We are developing a little application that given a directory with PDF files creates a unique PDF file containing all the PDF files in the directory. This is a simple task using iTextSharp. The problem appears if in the directory exist some files like Word documents, or Excel documents.
My question is, is there a way to convert word, excel documents into PDF programmatically? And even better, is this possible without having the office suite installed on the computer running the application?
Office 2007 allows for this. I have found PDFCreator to be good, the VBA is included in sample files, and have heard that CutePDF is also good. PDFCreator and CutePDF are free.
To work without Office, you would need viewers, as far as I know:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c8378bf4-996c-4569-b547-75edbd03aaf0&displaylang=EN
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=95E24C87-8732-48D5-8689-AB826E7B8FDF&displaylang=en
I needed to do this myself, but managed to get it done with .Net and without 3rd party tools:
MSDN: Saving Word 2007 Documents to PDF and XPS Formats
Pretty simple, about 50 lines of code. However I think you will need Word 2007 installed on the machine as well as the ability to Save As PDF
To convert Word documents to PDF, take a look at jWordConvert, a java library that can do exactly that. This will not work with the Excel files though, only with the Word files. The language is not Sharp, it's Java but you could switch to use IText (which is java) instead of ITextSharp.
You can also use a component like activePDF's DocConverter to convert a lot formats to PDF.
Use PDF maker that comes with adobe 7- 9
I just used this code Covert Doc to PDF
I'm surprised Aspose wasn't mentioned here, it's easy, simple, and reliable. Downside is that it is not free.
I've used iTextSharp in the past, it's really good, easy to install (one DLL I believe), the merge takes a bit of tindering so it's not as easy to use as Aspose, but hey, it's free so that is the best part.
TallPDF.NET (comes with a hefty price tag) allows you to serve dynamic PDF from any .NET application including ASP.NET pages and web services.
PDFEdit (free and open source) is an editor for manipulating PDF documents. It has a GUI version and a command-line interface. Scripting is used to a great extent in the editor and almost anything can be scripted. It is possible to create your own scripts or plugins.
The most common way to convert files to a pdf is to print them to a pdf printer driver. There are a number of such drivers, one that i know of that will do the job is Black Ice.
Another is to use Adobe Acrobat's SDK. from memory its very expensive.
Its been a while since i have actually done any work with converting pdf's and the landscape may have changed.
Related
I'm looking for ways to generate pdfs on-the-fly preferably using a command line tool as this will be done from a web-based system.
My requirements include must work on Windows and Linux, should be able to convert Microsoft Word, Excel and HTML into PDF.
Also the ability to concatenate or merge various documents into one PDF output file would be good.
Any suggestions? I would prefer to avoid applications that work as "printer drivers".
many thanks
After doing some research, the best solution I found in the end that could handle all the file formats we needed converting, plus which ran on Linux and Windows was a beautifully elegant lightweight Python script called PyODConverter. This uses OpenOffice (which itself runs in server mode) to do the actual conversions, and it really works beautifully. I used a separate tool called PDFTK to do the PDF concatenation, as I found that ImageMagick loses a lot of information (and creates huge file sizes).
If you find PyODConverter too limited, there is also a more powerful heavyweight option written by the same guy called JODConverter.
Calibre runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X and has command line tools on all three. It can translate a great many document types to PDF and other formats.
(Disclaimer: I'm a heavy user, help out on Calibre's IRC channel, and have been poking at development, so I'm just a bit biased.)
I think this has a command line utility, but not sure. Check this
PDF Creator
Have a look at biopdf, and a PDF printer that uses it called Bullzip PDF. Check the documentation for Bullzip PDF for examples on how it can be automated. It has an API interface as well as the GUI.
Our eTendering solution, www.monaqasat.com, currently works exclusively with PDF documents for various reasons, some of them being security. We are being asked if we can support DWF documents. For this to happen, we would need to find a way to automatically convert DWF documents to PDF, using some kind of Unix application.
Does anybody know any such application, preferably using Rails or Java?
Thanks,
.Karim
http://www.autodwg.com/pdf/
http://www.dwgto.com/
http://www.aidecad.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software
http://www.cogniview.com/convert-pdf-to-excel/category/pdf/
Suggestion would be to install a software printer call its APIs and pass dwf and get back pdf and then apply security as needed.
Autodesk has its DWF Toolkit available at
http://www.autodesk.com/dwftoolkit
It contains full source code in C++ to read & write DWF files, so it should be reasonably easy to make it run under Linux and to use a PDF library to write the output.
I need to develop a service able to convert MS Office and Open Office documents to PDF. And the PDF`s also need to be commentable when opened in ADOBE Reader.
I have used a piece of software from www.neevia.com. And it does the conversion, but is not able to make the PDF´s commentable and is therefore useless in my scenario.
Ideally I would like a piece of software that is monitoring a directory, and when a file is commited to that directory, the software detects this, fetches the file, converts it, and puts it in another directory. This way I can programmatically put the file I want converted in the IN folder and monitor the OUT folder to fetch the file when converted.
So do anyone know a piece of software capable of converting MS Office and Open Office files to commentable PDF`s?
It sounds like you're after the "Extend Features In Acrobat Reader" document rights feature that's part of Acrobat Professional. If you want a programmatic way of doing it then Adobe LiveCycle is the only game in town. This is one of the features that Adobe keeps for itself and no third party is legally allowed to provide it.
You could programmatically, using office automation, print documents to a postscript printer driver to get a postscript file, then use GhostScript to convert the PS file to PDF. Not sure of the commentable features supported by Adobe Reader as opposed to the full version of Acrobat, but it should create a reasonably well supported PDF file.
A-PDF may do what you want, it's web site claims it can convert office docs into PDF including batch convertion with watching a folder.
Both Office 2007 and OpenOffice can save directly to PDF, so you could automate that process.
However, changing the "document rights" of the PDF to allow commenting is something that only Adobe Acrobat can do. (This is Adobe's way of selling more product). There are other 3rd-party tools out there that claim to be able to do it (google change pdf +"document rights"), but I can't vouch for any of them.
I believe the commentable features are part of the PDF software, and not the file. Adobe Professional will allow to add comments, while the reader has less capabilities.
Hmmm, you can develop your own or just buy it off the shelf. My company (shameless plug) has a product that does server based PDF Conversion for common Office formats and can be invoked via a web service.
Blogged about it here. Making office work reliably on the server (32bit/64bit, Win2K3/Win2K8) is challenging to say the least.
I am looking for some good tools (free or paid, though free tool is always preferred)
for doing following operations on word doc files:
Manipulation of doc/docx/text files (like replacing some placeholders with DB values) as well as
converts doc files to .pdf
Because, I will be using this tool in my WCF service library,
So I am looking for a code library and not for a GUI based product.
Please share your experience regarding same.
Thank you!
Aspose has a decent collection of MS Office and PDF manipulation libraries.
Aspose Homepage
On the off chance that you're only looking for PDFs for viewing or archival purposes, you could also setup a PDF print driver and print your office files into a given location using Automation. You could also edit Office files through Automation although this may be tedious.
VSTO would give you access to the save as PDF from the Office applications.
Please see my answer to a related question on SO where I recommend a number of ways to convert your Word document to a format that is more easy to manipulate programmatically (using XSL-FO).
Clutching at straws here, I think I remember seeing a solution to this somewhere but can't find it now.
The issue is that I need a Windows application (not .Net) to be able to generate PDFs. The "standard" solution is to use something like PDF995 or CutePDF which create a dummy printer that your application can then print to and it is redirected to a PDF file. The problem is that to control those printers requires updating INI files or registry keys and that is error prone and often runs into concurrency problems.
Building the PDF file programmatically isn't an option, it needs to be able to take the output that would normally be sent to a printer, or possibly convert directly from an Excel file.
Ideally, I'd just pass the Excel file to a COM/ActiveX object and it would write to a file I specify. Next best option would be for it to create a separate printer per print job or have some reasonable way of guaranteeing the filename I give will have the document I print.
This Excel to PDF Batch converter might do the trick as at least it has a command line mode, has anyone tried that? It would only solve the problem for Excel files though.
So, is there a better solution?
(As a side note, for Visual FoxPro reports XFRX works really well, it converts the report directly to a PDF without needing a printer driver.)
You might want to look at BullZip (google it because I cannot add hyperlinks yet). We recently had Jody Meyer present this tool at the Detroit Area Fox User Group (previously shown at the Grand Rapids Area Fox User Group too). It was a great session.
She showed how to use the COM object to automate a ton of the BullZip features including the name of the file and properties like author and keywords. Watermarks are a snap too. It is simple and straightforward and her example was rock solid. Tons of features already done for you so you can simply re-engineer the demo form.
You can download it on the DAFUG Web site, in the downloads folder. File name is BullZipDemo.zip (google Detroit Area Fox User Group) and add the folder and filename.
Rick
VFP MVP
For this scenario I would recommend Amyuni PDF Converter. It provides a Microsoft Certified PDF Printer and ActiveX/.Net controls to communicate with it. Concurrency issues can be avoided by using these controls.
Disclaimer: I am part of the development team of this product.