Is there a MS Office to PDF conversion library

[Joshua Cranmer]

...

WD? That's a new one on me!

My fault for assuming that people were well-acquainted with the
specification process of the W3C. `WD' stands for `Working Draft' (i.e.,
this is only a rough draft and the final outcome may look nothing like
this.) Other levels are CR (Candidate Recommendation, probably stable),
PR (Proposed Recommendation, a level only requiring two open,
independent implementations to proceed), and REC (Recommendation, the
real deal).

 

[Andrew Thompson]

My fault for assuming that people were well-acquainted with the
specification process of the W3C.

Uggh.. I could become buried in W3C abbreviations.
Their site content sometimes reads like a list of
abbreviations with an occasional word thrown in
(purely for stylistic effect).

...`WD' stands for `Working Draft' (i.e.,
this is only a rough draft and the final outcome may look nothing like
this.) Other levels are CR (Candidate Recommendation, probably stable),
PR (Proposed Recommendation, a level only requiring two open,
independent implementations to proceed), and REC (Recommendation, the
real deal).

Hm... How about we consider *standards* to
be the 'real deal' and demote recommendations*
to something slightly less?

* I find it somewhat irritating that to get the
'major players' onboard with W3C, they had to
(AFAIR) decide they would only ever make
'recommendations'.

 

[Joshua Cranmer]

Hm... How about we consider *standards* to
be the 'real deal' and demote recommendations*
to something slightly less?

A W3C Recommendation = standard for all practical measures. If you
really want to mince words, the basis of every major protocol (HTTP,
FTP, NNTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, TLS, TCP/IP, UDP, etc.) comes from the
RFCs... "Requests for Comments". If the full documentation for HTTP is
technically nothing more than a request for people to comment on, than a
Recommendation is closer to an actual standard.

Then again, MS's attempts to get OOXML passed as an ISO standard are
showing just how well the largest standards organization is doing with
their standards. I would rather read JLS 3 over ES 3 (the current
version of Javascript) any day.

P.S. Sorry for the burst of acronyms, but I really don't want to write
out all of these names...

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Hm... How about we consider *standards* to
be the 'real deal' and demote recommendations*
to something slightly less?

* I find it somewhat irritating that to get the
'major players' onboard with W3C, they had to
(AFAIR) decide they would only ever make
'recommendations'.

Considering that the internet is build on requests for
comments, then recommendations is not that bad !



Arne

 

[Lew]

Considering that the internet is build on requests for
comments, then recommendations is not that bad !

It's not the only context where a "recommendation" carries the force of a
mandate. When my boss at work "recommends" that I take care of something, I
could be unemployed if I decide I don't need to worry about that little thing,
for example.

Actually, the word "recommendation" is quite apt. Take TCP/IP for example.
There were, and most likely still are all kinds of protocols that one could
use instead. One doesn't have to use TCP/IP - but it is recommended.

 

[AL]

Eeby, 14.01.2008 14:31:

OpenOffice can generate PDF, can read MS Office and has an integration
with Java. Maybe that could be a way for you.

Thomas

Thomas,

I'm way in over my head here, but is this what you are referring to?
http://codesnippets.services.openoffice.org/Office/Office.ConvertDocuments.snip

The examples seem to indicate user input to select a document for
conversion but it appears to me a file list from a directory could be
used to feed the conversion thereby converting all the files in a given
directory to PDF. Unfortunately a couple links referenced in the
snippets were invalid and one method was deprecated - I think it was
newfile.toURL()

Anyway, my eyes are burning and I still have a long way to go to make
sense of it all, but this seemed like the direction you were pointing
the OP. (?)

AL

 

[Steve Sobol]

Wow! Are you the OP's manager?

Of course I'm not, I'm just presenting a possible (probable?) answer.

 

[Andrew Thompson]

Of course I'm not, I'm just presenting a possible (probable?) answer.

Fair enough, but I'd prefer not to speculate.
I'm waiting to hear the OP's (OK the manager's)
*actual* reason(s).

 

[Roedy Green]

Does anyone know of a Java library that I could use for this? Or any
library in any language? PHP? Perl?

see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/pdf.html

There are lots of links and also a link to Marco Schmidt's list of pdf
links. You should find something in there.

 

[RedGrittyBrick]

If you
really want to mince words, the basis of every major protocol (HTTP,
FTP, NNTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, TLS, TCP/IP, UDP, etc.) comes from the
RFCs... "Requests for Comments". If the full documentation for HTTP is
technically nothing more than a request for people to comment on, than a
Recommendation is closer to an actual standard.

Not exactly true, RFCs can pass through a standards-track process that
assigns a "status" to them:

"A specification that reaches the status of Standard is assigned a
number in the STD series while retaining its RFC number." - IETF [1]

IETF STD-1 says that RFC 2616 (HTTP) currently has status "Draft
Standard Protocol"

Whether an IETF "draft standard" like HTTP is closer to a "standard"
than a W3C "recommendation" like HTML is something I don't wish to
comment on



[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2026#section-4.1.3

 

[Lew]

see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/pdf.html

iText is an excellent PDF-generation package for Java. It isn't for the "read
MS Office" side of things, though.
<http://www.lowagie.com/iText/>

 

[Gordon Beaton]

My boss asked me to research this question. He wants me to write a
script / program that will convert a directory of Word, Excel, and
PowerPoint documents into PDFs.

If you are happy using OpenOffice to do the conversion (OO isn't 100%
compatible), then maybe this will help:

http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/Convert_MS_Word.html

/gordon

--

 

[Martin Gregorie]

Thats a pretty good reason given that M$ don't supply a viewer for OSen
other than Winders and haven't seen fit to support an Open Source version.

IMO that lack trumps the bandwidth criticism of PDF.

I'm never happy to see an MSOffice document released on the web when a
PDF, web page or even a JPG scanned image could be used almost as easily.

 

[Joshua Cranmer]

Not exactly true, RFCs can pass through a standards-track process that
assigns a "status" to them:

"A specification that reaches the status of Standard is assigned a
number in the STD series while retaining its RFC number." - IETF [1]
>
IETF STD-1 says that RFC 2616 (HTTP) currently has status "Draft
Standard Protocol"

I know about the draft standard process--I actually have all of the
drafts of RFC 3977 (the update of NNTP) since it relates to another
project. I was mostly continuing the joke on the actual meanings of the
names.

Whether an IETF "draft standard" like HTTP is closer to a "standard"
than a W3C "recommendation" like HTML is something I don't wish to
comment on

Actual IETF drafts are not too close: an implementation of draft 15 of
RFC 3977 would have some problems conforming to the actual RFC. I'm not
sure about the numbered RFCs labeled "Draft" though.

P.S. I don't think its coincidence that RFC 2822 updates RFC 822 and RFC
3977 updates RFC 977...

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

If you really want to mince words, the basis of every major protocol
(HTTP, FTP, NNTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, TLS, TCP/IP, UDP, etc.) comes from
the RFCs... "Requests for Comments". If the full documentation for
HTTP is technically nothing more than a request for people to comment
on, than a Recommendation is closer to an actual standard.

Not exactly true, RFCs can pass through a standards-track process that
assigns a "status" to them:

"A specification that reaches the status of Standard is assigned a
number in the STD series while retaining its RFC number." - IETF [1]

IETF STD-1 says that RFC 2616 (HTTP) currently has status "Draft
Standard Protocol"

Whether an IETF "draft standard" like HTTP is closer to a "standard"
than a W3C "recommendation" like HTML is something I don't wish to
comment on

The STD process is a later addon.

Arne