Is OpenOffice necessary for Word -> PDF transformation?

[joko71]

This question is for 2.1 version.

And a simple one. At the moment I'm running OpenOffice for the sole purpose of enabling Word -> PDF transformation. It is too cumbersome for my taste.

Is that really necessary? Is there any other, more simpler way to achieve this?

[mrogers]

You can plug in another transformer.     In particular the POI library can deal with simple text extraction from Word files.

[joko71]

Word -> PDF transformation would work with 2.1 version?

[mrogers]

Yes pluggable content transformation has been a feature of alfresco since the early days.

[joko71]

I browsed through my Alfresco and I've found POI library and XML files which seem to support that library and transformations. But Word -> PDF transformation didn't work until I've started messing with OpenOffice. Before that transformer couldn't be found by my Java code.

What do I have to do so that this POI setup works for me?