ColdFusion 9/OpenOffice for Word to PDF

Is anyone using the CF9/OpenOffice to convert Word/Excel documents to PDF? How well is it working? What sort of issues did you run into? How did you get around them? Trying to evaluate this option before diving in... Thanks, Justin

> Is anyone using the CF9/OpenOffice to convert Word/Excel documents to PDF? How well is it working? > What sort of issues did you run into? How did you get around them? > > Trying to evaluate this option before diving in... We're using it, and haven't run into any significant issues, except for one - the process itself is fairly slow, and you wouldn't want to be doing a whole lot of these concurrently. But you can program around that via queuing, threads, etc. If you have questions about how it would handle specific documents, it's very easy to set up a test environment and just try it out with those documents. Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software http://www.figleaf.com/ http://training.figleaf.com/ Fig Leaf Software is a Veteran-Owned Small Business (VOSB) on GSA Schedule, and provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized instruction at our training centers, online, or onsite.

Excellent! I will go ahead and give it a shot. Thanks for the input Dave! > Is anyone using the CF9/OpenOffice to convert Word/Excel documents to PDF? How well is it working? > What sort of issues did you run into? How did you get around them? > > Trying to evaluate this option before diving in... We're using it, and haven't run into any significant issues, except for one - the process itself is fairly slow, and you wouldn't want to be doing a whole lot of these concurrently. But you can program around that via queuing, threads, etc. If you have questions about how it would handle specific documents, it's very easy to set up a test environment and just try it out with those documents. Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software http://www.figleaf.com/ http://training.figleaf.com/ Fig Leaf Software is a Veteran-Owned Small Business (VOSB) on GSA Schedule, and provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized instruction at our training centers, online, or onsite.

> Is anyone using the CF9/OpenOffice to convert Word/Excel documents to PDF? How well is it working? What sort of issues did you run into? How did you get around them? If you have a history / archive of documents that have not been created with PDF conversion in mind any conversion project is going to be painful. That is not because of either OpenOffice or ColdFusion, but because Office type of documents tend to be of very poor quality. I have done one project in particular for one of the Big Four where we basically pointed LiveCycle PDF Generator + MS Office + OpenOffice at a network drive with 12 years of documents to convert \and the things we ran into were: - password protection; - missing fonts; - no print permissions; - incorrect print ranges; - wrong paper format; - missing linked documents; - Office apps hanging on various dialogues (updates, missing references files, macros etc.). I believe the project ended up sending a significant part to India for manual conversion. But if you are dealing with current documents it is a whole different ballgame. Take a CMS like Razuna or Alfresco and configure / program it to run an automated PDF conversion for every document that is being saved. All errors get returned to the person who uploaded the document and people will learn fast. Fix the permissions so that only the owner can download the source format and the rest has to use the PDF file and you have turned the rest of the users into a large QA group. Jochem -- Jochem van Dieten http://jochem.vandieten.net/

>>12 years of documents to convert For 12 years old MS Word documents, I can believe Open Office is capable of interpreting the document properly, but for more recent ones, Op.Of seems to be far behind.

>>Is anyone using the CF9/OpenOffice to convert Word/Excel documents to PDF? How well is it working? Pretty badly. I even didn't try it under CF since I never was able to get a proper conversion from MS Word to Open Office. It might work well with plain text, but forget about formating.