Outputting Docx4J to PDF File - docx4j

Question

I am using the commercial version of docx4j and we have a requirement to output the document to PDF format. I understand there are two options. One is to use an online converter tool. The other is to use a legacy docx4j-export-fo. We can't use the first approach due to the company firewall rules, so the system needs to be self contained, which means option 2.
My pom looks like the following:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.pdfbox</groupId>
<artifactId>pdfbox</artifactId>
<version>2.0.4</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.plutext</groupId>
<artifactId>Plutext-Enterprise</artifactId>
<version>8.1.0.4</version>
<exclusions>
<exclusion>
<groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
<artifactId>slf4j-log4j12</artifactId>
</exclusion>
<exclusion>
<groupId>log4j</groupId>
<artifactId>log4j</artifactId>
</exclusion>
</exclusions>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.docx4j</groupId>
<artifactId>docx4j-JAXB-Internal</artifactId>
<version>8.2.9</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.docx4j</groupId>
<artifactId>docx4j-export-fo</artifactId>
<version>8.2.9</version>
<exclusions>
<exclusion>
<groupId>org.apache.xmlgraphics</groupId>
<artifactId>xmlgraphics-commons</artifactId>
</exclusion>
<exclusion>
<groupId>org.apache.pdfbox</groupId>
<artifactId>fontbox</artifactId>
</exclusion>
</exclusions>
</dependency>
The exclusions were to address the issues detected by the maven enforcer. When attempting to covert the word document to PDF, the test fails with the following:
Looks like your endpoint URL 'http://localhost:9016/v1/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000/convert' is wrong
This seems to indicate the first approach is being used rather than the second, which is not the desired result.
I've also tried using apache poi to do the conversion, but that fails with NPEs. Can anyone suggest how to get round this issue?

Answer 1

The current options are set out at https://www.docx4java.org/blog/2020/09/office-pptxxlsxdocx-to-pdf-to-in-docx4j-8-2-3/
Whether export-fo is used depends on:
Class<?> clazz = Class.forName("org.docx4j.convert.out.fo.FOExporterVisitor");
Can you confirm docx4j-export-fo is on your classpath? Perhaps you have security settings prohibiting reflection?
You can try invoking it directly:
FOSettings settings = Docx4J.createFOSettings();
settings.setOpcPackage(wmlPackage);
settings.setApacheFopMime("application/pdf");
Docx4J.toFO(settings, outputStream, Docx4J.FLAG_NONE);