What's the best program / API for converting W

Question

Well, really the title of the question says it all. There are similar questions on SO already. But here's some differences... I absolutely cannot use Office on the server. I must be able to convert the document programmatically. I don't really care how much it costs. Obviously cheaper is better, but if you have a good suggestion that happens to be pricey, please feel free to include it.

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I accepted the OpenOffice.org answer because it seemed like the most intriguing. However, I really am curious what other people think. Keep posting answers and voting and I'll accept whichever has the most votes.

Answer 1

You might want to try Aspose, which is also used by Google.

Answer 2

Using Convert API it is simple as this HTTP request:

POST https://v2.convertapi.com/doc/to/pdf?Secret=XXX&File=http://example.com/myfile.doc

if file is accessible from the internet. If file is not accessible from the internet, Convert API supports many ways how to pass a file for conversion.

Answer 3

OpenOffice can be run in a GUI-less server mode. Using it that way, you can connect to it, stream a document to it, and then convert to any type it supports and stream it back.

Answer 4

If you want to use OpenOffice then you may use from the command line unoconv with latest LibreOffice. This works in general but be prepared to:

• have some more fancy formatting lost,
• repeat conversion due to some exception on LibreOffice side.

I would discourage using UNO API directly. This is possible (and you may have a pool of running OpenOffice servers that will perform the conversion) but definitely not easy.

Google Docs is for me of no use as the conversion file size limit is 2 MB.

Answer 5

You might want to have a look at the CloudConvert API. They are using native Office and they are a way cheaper than Aspose.

Answer 6

If you upload a document (.doc, .docx, .odf) to google documents you can download as a PDF. This is an easy free solution but it might be hard to integrate.