I know this question has been asked over and over, but I can't find the answer I'm looking for. So I'll shamelessly try again.
I'm looking for a reliable, stand-alone tool for converting Word documents to PDF. A command-line tool or .NET library would be ideal, but a regular Windows DLL could work, too. But my app can't rely on any of the following:
- installing a printer driver
- scripting MS Office
- scripting OpenOffice
- licence for a commercial library
- controlling a windowed application via the UI
On the other hand I'm not looking for perfect fidelity, in fact I don't even care about fonts and formatting, just about getting the basic table/textbox layout about right.
I looked at Aspose.Words.NET, and while it does the conversion job perfectly, it's expensive and seems like overkill. I was tempted (in my frustration) to just use the trial version of Aspose as this project isn't for public release, but the trial version won't work with documents above an undisclosed number of paragraphs and the documentation is very vague on this point so I wouldn't know what to expect down the line. Anyway that would be wrong. ;)
Any ideas?
