[TriLUG] More difficult than it should be

[Brian McCullough]

Folks,

As usual, this is one of the places that many of us look when we have
"interesting" questions.


I have a "friend" ( well he is most of the time ) who has asked me to do
a "mail merge" program on his web site.

Ok, fine.  No big problem, right?

Except that he wants to use RTF as the source of the mailing list, and
Word Docs as the letter template.

I know that I can use PHP on this machine, but have very little access.
It is a hosted web site, with only FTP access to the "back side."


Hunting for PHP code that will do this for me has been, well, not
completely fruitless, but almost so, since most of the code seems to be
wanting to generate RTF files from some other technology, or translate
RTF files into PDFs or something else.


I would much rather do this the "right" way, with a database engine
providing both the mailing list and templates, since the output is, I
would think, going to be either plain text or HTML.  However, these are
what he has provided, so I am trying to comply.  At least until I can
tell him definitively that he is crazy to try and use M$ documents for
somthing that is MUCH better done otherwise.


Any suggestions?


Thanks,
Brian