Use MS Office as PDF convertor

[simon]

Hi again,

This may sound as a strange question but is it possible to replace the OpenOffice text conversion engine by MS Office?

Our company supports MS Office (as most companies probably) but doesn't support OpenOffice. Starting with Alfresco would mean even more work for the helpdesk and we are not sure we could guarantee a 100% match with difficult Word documents or horrible PowerPoint presentations.

Does anyone has some experience with this or can OpenOffice guarantee flawless conversions for - even the most complicated - MS Office documents to PDF?

Even more important: what if the conversion fails?! Our plan is to setup an automated conversion to PDF rule for all our external documents, it's impossible to check all those documents manually so is there some way to detect (and solve) conversion errors?

[kevinr]

If you can implement a Java class that can call MSOffice for you then yes it's possible. All of the transformers in Alfresco are pluggable and new ones can be added:

The documentation to read is:

http://www.alfresco.org/mediawiki/index.php/Content_Transformations
http://www.alfresco.org/mediawiki/index.php/Adding_a_Mime_Type
http://www.alfresco.org/mediawiki/index.php/Web_Client_Configuration_Guide#Transformation_Mimetype

Hope this helps,

Kevin

[simon]

We are running Alfresco on Linux so it will be even harder to get this working.

Tried some conversions from our MS Word company templates to PDF with the OpenOffice transformer and they failed horribly. Not an Alfresco problem, I know but why is there no PDF converter (unless Adobe distiller probably) around that can guarantee a 100% compatibility?!

So start implementing a Java class? Won't be easy… Other idea's, anyone?

[choon]

I solved a similar problem through printing files to post script and going from there.
Hope that helps,
Dan