We had no desire to enter the PDF market, so it's released as free open source. It's better to use Office for this with OfficeToPDF as the "wrapper" around it. Simple, but the only alternatives we could find were proprietary and had price tags over $10K for a site license.
This takes away the need for an individual user to do this manually. So, OfficeToPDF is run as a background process (via the command line) and can be programmed to convert every new file into a PDF.
If you wanted to keep all of the documents produced by a team in a shared area (or even better, in a document management system) then you'd end up with a mixture of e.g. This is fine as long as every individual user has the time and presence of mind to save every file in both the Office format and as a PDF. There are different options, but generally the PDF it produces is of a consistently high quality. It allows you quite simply to save a file as a PDF or XPS document.
Office users will know that if you use Office 2007 you have to download and install a separate add-in called "Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS". When printing, you don't always get features like hyperlinks that Office PDF output supports.īasically, Office now has better PDF output capabilities than many competing PDF products. When you render Office documents by parsing, you don't always get all the rendering subtleties that Office formats support.
Many companies have developed PDF software that either attempt to parse the source Office document format and then render it to PDF, or print-spool the document using Office to a PDF printer device. The fact we had to write it ourselves shows how unsuccessful we were in looking for an existing solution. The fact that we use it daily means it's a robust offering.
What we were able to do is to separate code we'd written and make it a stand-alone component. Of course, this is one of the features of CogniDox. This can be useful if, for example, a department has a policy of only distributing PDF versions of documents to people outside the department. These PDF files can then be stored and managed on a separate server. OfficeToPDF is useful (and unique, as far as we can tell) if you want to automatically create PDF files on a server-wide basis and free individual users from an extra step of using the "Save as." command on their Office files. Most Office to PDF converter tools are intended as single-user desktop applications. You need to focus on the words "automates" and "server-based". Calm down, we're not quite losing the plot. Now, you may just read the words "PDF" and "conversion" and think we're out of our minds releasing yet another PDF tool, even if it is free. It requires an installation of either Office 2007 or 2010 to work. It's called OfficeToPDF and it's a free command line tool that automates server-based PDF conversion for Microsoft Office 20 users. This week we released another project under an open source license.