[thelist] PDF conversion methods and tools

[Paul Bennett]

Hi Ron, and 'welcome back signal'...

You don't mention server technologies available to you so I'll throw some ideas and links your way, with the hope that it'll get you started.

(1) PHP has a large amount of PDF creating / manipulating functions if you compile it '--with-pdflib'
http://nz2.php.net/pdf  
My old workplace did some great things with dynamic pdf's. Unfortunately I was involved in two non-pdf projects, so no extra info is available from me there.

(2)Here's some info on automating word-to-html conversion
http://www.bigbold.com/snippets/posts/show/416

(3) here's some info about a 'wordcleaner' script which will take a lot of the crap code out from process (2)
http://textism.com/wordcleaner/
Maybe if you ask nicely you'll be able to get your hands on the script, or at least get your organisation to buy it if it proves useful

(4)Also a technology you may be able to utilise (we have for automating boring repetitive tasks in Acrobat) is the JavaScript functionality in Acrobat.

You can use it for a number of things, even to write file processing macros - a huge time saver
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/acrobat/sdk/index_doc.html#js


>From my cursory examination, it appears that the best process may be word->html->pdf, as I can't find support for word-> pdf automation server-side.

I'm not aware of a 'one-click' solution, but hopefully someone will pipe up :)