Programmatic Conversion of any office document to PDF format..

[Dibs]

Hi all,

Can anyone tell me if programmatic conversion of any Office 2007 documents
to PDF format is possible or not ? If yes, please suggest me a way or links
to some articles/projects which may solve my purpose.
Also, does VS2005 provide any built-in classes to achieve this functionality?
Any suggestions appreciated..

Regards,
Dibs

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?RGlicw==?=,

Can anyone tell me if programmatic conversion of any Office 2007 documents
to PDF format is possible or not ? If yes, please suggest me a way or links
to some articles/projects which may solve my purpose.

For this, see my reply to "spm" in this newsgroups (posted today, but the
original question is fairly old)

Also, does VS2005 provide any built-in classes to achieve this functionality?

No, neither Visual Studio nor VSTO provides anything to achieve this.
Theoretically, you could take advantage of the open XML file format and the
public schema for the PDF format and "roll your own" transformation...

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail

 

[Dibs]

Thanks Cindy,

You have said 'theoretically' it is possible through Open XML format. I
wanna know have you tried doing this or as a matter-of-fact, do you know of
any, who has tried this. I am very much new to this and can't get to see how
to start.
I will definitely look for the Open XML format in the next few days.

Thanks again,
Dibs

 

[Bernhard@Setup]

As far as I know Microsoft will publish a download ("plug-in") for Office
2007 for creating PDF-documents. In the Beta-phase this feature was a
built-in feature, but for the release Microsoft made the agreement with Adobe
that this will be availiable with a free download.
Hopefully with this download an API for that is available.

If this is not possible try a PDF-software (e.g. free open source "PDF
Creator" on SourceForge) do do that. For this implementation you need to open
the document in Word.

Regards,
Bernhard

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

As far as I know Microsoft will publish a download ("plug-in") for Office
2007 for creating PDF-documents. In the Beta-phase this feature was a
built-in feature,

It went away in B2TR, but the downloadable add-in was made available for testing,
so it worked pretty much the same as the release version should.

As to whether you can automate it, I'm not sure. At first glance, it appears so;
there's a ppSaveAsPDF included in the SaveAsType enumeration in the object model.
That causes an error when you try to use it, though. Same with the
..ExportAsFixedFormat method. Unless I'm using them correctly, they'd appear to
be bits of object model inadvertently left over from the beta.

 

[Dibs]

Thank you guys for the quick response...

At least we have a ray of hope that the 'Save as PDF' functionality will be
available in the object model.
let's wait and see..
If you come across any related information, please care to inform me. I will
do the same..

regards,
Dibs

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?RGlicw==?=,

You have said 'theoretically' it is possible through Open XML format. I
wanna know have you tried doing this or as a matter-of-fact, do you know of
any, who has tried this. I am very much new to this and can't get to see how
to start.
I will definitely look for the Open XML format in the next few days.

No, this is something I've never tried. I know people successfully transformed
the Word 2003 XML file format to PDF, and there are third-party tools you can
use in your projects for that. So it's possible, but would be quite a bit of
work.

As to automating the d/l: it's an Add-in, so it's going to depend on whether
the Add-in provides any public interface. I wasn't able to download it the
other day, so I haven't been able to investigate the situation at all.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Thank you guys for the quick response...

At least we have a ray of hope that the 'Save as PDF' functionality will be
available in the object model.

I suspect it'll depend on Microsoft and Adobe coming to some kind of agreement.

let's wait and see..
If you come across any related information, please care to inform me. I will
do the same..

If you're under pressure to produce PDFs, look into GhostScript. It's usable under
several licenses, one of which apparently allows it to be incorporated into a
commercial product.