[ciapug] Converting docs to pdfs

[David Champion]

Chris Hettinger wrote:

>Would anyone have a recommendation on a script / library for converting documents to PDF?
>
>My scenario involves a user uploading files that are allowed by the upload script, in various formats, and after upload I want to convert those files to PDF files that will be stored and then linked in a html page for download.
>
>Files types will be of two categories, images and text documents.
>Images Formats: jpeg, png, gif, bmp
>Text Formats: word .doc, word perfect, claris works, notepad, wordpad, ... list of text document formats.
>
>  
>

There are several ghostscript (the gnu postscript engine) scripts that 
do this sort of thing. Do a google for "rtf2pdf".

I don't know how well these are going to format the docs for you, my 
guess is they will do a fair job, but won't be perfect. You'd get better 
results converting to PDF using one of the Adobe tools on the desktop

I would try to get it to work with a few formats - like RTF. All of the 
apps you list above should be able to save docs in RTF. MS Word docs are 
in a proprietary binary file format, that some people (like 
OpenOffice.org) have done a decent job of reverse-engineering.

-dc