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The Joel on Software Discussion Group (CLOSED)

I need to write a simple upload form that will take a document, convert it to PDF, and spit out a link to the resulting document.  Can anyone recommend a good library (preferably .NET, PHP, or Perl) for converting Word documents into PDF files?  If such a thing exist already, on the cheap, I'd happily accept recommendations for that as well.  Thanks!

http://www.aspose.com/Products/Aspose.Pdf/Default.aspx

@Henry: I'll check that out.  Thanks!

the general demos dont seem to work on that site.
@henry - have you used this software?

PDFCreator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/) is very nice.

I've got a review of it on my blog:
http://www.gooli.org/blog/printing-to-a-pdf/

for office 2007 there is
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en

Maybe it can be run using a vba macro.

I have used Aspose to programmatically create PDFs from Word and it does work as advertised. If I remember correctly to go from Word to PDF I think you also need the Word component.

You're opening a can of worms trying to automate Word manipulation on a server with Office 2003 and prior formats.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757/en-us
"Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support, Automation of Microsoft Office applications from any unattended, non-interactive client application or component (including ASP, DCOM, and NT Services), because Office may exhibit unstable behavior and/or deadlock when run in this environment."

What kind of Word document are they uploading? Is it something you can collect with a web form instead?

+MAX_INT for PDFCreator. It just works. Awesome product. I use it to create PDFs from Word all the time.

PDFSharp:
http://www.pdfsharp.com/PDFsharp/index.php

It's free/open source with a permissive enough license that you can embed it in your app.

Google Documents

+MAX_INT now? I guess inflation has reached its logical extreme. Unless we want to go for +MAX_LONGLONG or +NaN :)

@Philo: It's a syllabus.  And while the syllabus technically has a template, I don't have the luxury of time trying to hammer out a form for it right now.