How to convert Word and Excel documents to PDF pro

Question

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?

Answer 1

You can also use a component like activePDF's DocConverter to convert a lot formats to PDF.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Use PDF maker that comes with adobe 7- 9

I just used this code Covert Doc to PDF

Answer 5

The most common way to convert files to a pdf is to print them 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.

Answer 6

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.