Using Tinybutstrong and openTBS i created a script in PHP that opens multiple docx templates and replaces a lot of variables with values from a database. In a nutshell clients can download their unique files, add information and pictures and upload them again. This works excellent. But of coarse i wouldn't post here if there wasn't some sort of problem.
Because of the barcodes (I am using barcode fonts and embed them in Word because the documents will be scanned far later in the process), the documents get huge. Instead of 100 KB average, they'll easily get 7MB. This is a problem, because per year about 20.000 documents will be scanned. That's an extra +/- 130 GB per year.
It's a long story but we need docx, so we can't simply replace it with some sort of PHP / MySQL template that would be far more efficient.
Word has the option to just embed the font symbols that are being used to cut on the size. But that isn't an option, because the main template needs to have all chars available. It's also not an option to send the font to the users, since there are +/- 20.000 new ones each year.
Is there another solution to cut the file size or use compression. Perhaps in Word, PHP, FTP, Apache?