Forum OpenACS Q&A: server side document to .pdf conversion

I made a little mistake...

Actually I want to convert the document to .pdf first and whenever a user wants to download that document, a password (his user_id + version_id) is being enhanced to the existing .pdf!

The user downloading the .pdf will have to type in his user_id + version_id in order to open the .pdf...

This article might be helpful:
Create a PDF Service with Samba
Use GhostScript to create a PDF document out of any PostScript printer job
http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=1736
it describes how to set up a Samba pdf file printer and how to use it with the lpr command (I don't know how lpr handles .doc, .xsl etc., a specific driver or converter might be needed to spit .ps to the printer). I'm too new to tcl and ns api to tell how to send a command line from a web script, but it must be possible.

I don't see how you are going to achieve this on the server without actually invoking a copy of Word/Excel/PowerPoint on a Windows box somewhere.  And then, aren't those files going to need the fonts embedded in them in case the machine that you are running Word/XL/PP doesn't have them installed?

Lastly (sorry to be a wet blanket--it really is a great idea), there are tons of job options to be set in Distiller, and sometimes you want different options depending on the contents of the file.

This is a tough problem--it seems like it would be easier just to convert the file to PDF before you upload it.

Doc2Pdf looks pretty close to what you want.

Doc2pdf is an email robot that converts Microsoft Office attachments (.doc, .ppt and .xls) to PDF files. All you need do is carbon-copy (CC) doc2pdf when you email a Microsoft Office document. Doc2pdf converts the attachment to a PDF file and sends the PDF file, as an attachment, in a reply to all recipients.

It's an email robot, but you could probably hack it to work serverside.

This is part of the Link that David posted. It looks to be close to my solution:
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<i>"PDF Creation
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Unfortunately I have not been able to get OpenOffice's print-to-PDF option to work for as long as I have been using it. In the meantime, the absolutely excellent KDE printing architecture (see below) allows one to print to a PDF. So, we simply print to a Postscript (.ps) file, click on that to open it in KGhostView, and then click "Print" and choose "Print to PDF." Voila, you have a gorgeous PDF.
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Prior to the KDE print architecture, we used createpdf.adobe.com . For $10/month you get to create an unlimited number of PDFs from many file formats, including Postscript (which all UNIX apps with printing capability can export). It also converts .doc and .xls files as well, so it's just as useful for those who us MS Office but would like to produce open, professional looking documents for export to your customers or business partners."
</i>
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Adobe's createpdf.adobe.com has actually everything that I would need: You can upload a file in almost any format, choose the appropriate security options (in my case: password), and let them send it to you via email, link or download in browser...
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It would be nice if I could automize this procedure, but I doubt it will work... (haven't checked the Terms of Use either) It would be great if my server could log into Adobe's service, convert the file and receive the pdf automatically? Any suggestions?
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Does anyone have experience with converting a document on KDE and KGhostView how it is descibed in the first part?
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Thanks

it is possible to create a script that uploads a file to the remote site and then
downloads the converted version.  You might have to learn some more about
rfc1823 (file uploads) first.  You may have to program some authentication
headers or a login process into your script as well.

Since the adobe site takes 15 minutes when you're a subscriber, you would
have to schedule an task to retrieve the completed pdf 15 minutes later and
figure out what to do with it next.

I've had some limited experience with this, specifically html to PDF conversion. I ended up using a product called htmldoc, which gave me reasonable results and speed. I recall using ghostscript in conjunction with another parser which produced postscript, but if I recall correctly, the ghostscript execution was rather slow (of course, I was converting >100 pages with tables in one shot). A potential solution for you would be to use wvWare and friends in conjunction with ghostscript.

Hello Nathan,

the openoffice solution sounds and looks to be pretty superior... I heard that SUN will start *licensing* StarOffice from version 6.0 on! OpenOffice will remain opensource though I believe.

Do you know what kind of people are/were hacking around with an openoffice conversion solution? Which community could I bother with this?? I already talked to some developers at openoffice.org, but they all seem to work for SUN and told me that they are developing a closed source solution doing conversion. (What great of an opensource community 😉... That was ~4 month ago - things might have changed?!

How to do it with Java:

---------------------------------------------------
import officetools.OfficeFile;
...
FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(new File("test.doc")); // works with xls also
FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(new File("test.pdf"));
OfficeFile f = new OfficeFile(fis,"localhost","8100", true);
f.convert(fos,"pdf");
---------------------------------------------------

All possible convertions:
doc --> pdf, html, txt, rtf
xls --> pdf, html, csv
ppt --> pdf, swf
html --> pdf

Maybe useful: http://dancrintea.ro/html-to-pdf/
HTML to PDF with PHP, Java or ASP

Recently i came across a requirement to convert a wide range of file formats (.doc, docx, .xls, .rtf , .odt, .ods, .ppt etc.) to pdf file in PHP.I found a very good utility to do this, which i would like to share with you all.
You need to have OpenOffice and unoconv installed for this.
unoconv is a command line utility that can convert any file format that OpenOffice can import, to any file format that OpenOffice is capable of exporting.Some of the supported document formats are Open Document Format (.odt), MS Word (.doc), MS Office Open/MS OOXML (.xml), Portable Document Format (.pdf), HTML, XHTML, RTF, Docbook (.xml), and more.