Generating high fidelity PDF output from Office documents has always been a challenge, given the “long tail” of features which are possible in docx\/pptx\/xlsx files.<\/p>\n
For Word documents, it is easy enough to output paragraphs of text, tables and images. But add in VML, DrawingML, equations, SmartArt, and fidelity becomes a challenge.<\/p>\n
If your documents are constrained, you may be able to find a suitable conversion tool. Plutext’s PDF Converter was a good example of this. It worked well on a growing range of documents.<\/p>\n
But ultimately, if you want great fidelity on a unconstrained set of files, you need to be using Microsoft’s own Office layout engine.<\/p>\n
There are various ways to do that, for example https:\/\/developer.microsoft.com\/en-us\/graph\/examples\/document-conversion<\/p>\n
For Java developers, a good solution is documents4j.<\/p>\n
It uses Office and the Microsoft Scripting Host for VBS on the conversion machine, so that machine must Microsoft Windows. <\/p>\n
Documents4j can run either a “LocalConverter” or a “RemoteConverter”. <\/p>\n
Using a LocalConverter is as simple as:<\/p>\n
\r\nimport java.io.File;\r\nimport java.util.concurrent.Future;\r\nimport java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;\r\n\r\nimport com.documents4j.api.DocumentType;\r\nimport com.documents4j.api.IConverter;\r\nimport com.documents4j.job.LocalConverter;\r\n\r\npublic class ToPDF {\r\n\r\n\tpublic static void main(String[] args) {\r\n\r\n\t\tFile wordFile = new File( System.getProperty("user.dir")+"\/input.docx" ); \r\n\t\tFile target = new File( System.getProperty("user.dir")+"\/output.pdf" );\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\tIConverter converter = LocalConverter.builder()\r\n .baseFolder(new File("C:\\\\temp"))\r\n .workerPool(20, 25, 2, TimeUnit.SECONDS)\r\n .processTimeout(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS)\r\n .build();\t\t\r\n \r\n Future<Boolean> conversion = converter\r\n .convert(wordFile).as(DocumentType.MS_WORD)\r\n .to(target).as(DocumentType.PDF)\r\n .prioritizeWith(1000) \/\/ optional\r\n .schedule();\r\n \r\n\t}\r\n\r\n}\r\n<\/pre>\nFrom Maven, you just need these dependencies:<\/p>\n
\r\n\t\t<dependency>\r\n\t\t\t<groupId>com.documents4j<\/groupId>\r\n\t\t\t<artifactId>documents4j-local<\/artifactId>\r\n\t\t\t<version>1.1.1<\/version>\r\n\t\t<\/dependency>\r\n\r\n\t\t<dependency>\r\n\t\t\t<groupId>com.documents4j<\/groupId>\r\n\t\t\t<artifactId>documents4j-transformer-msoffice-word<\/artifactId>\r\n\t\t\t<version>1.1.1<\/version>\r\n\t\t<\/dependency>\r\n\r\n\t\t<dependency>\r\n\t\t\t<groupId>org.slf4j<\/groupId>\r\n\t\t\t<artifactId>slf4j-simple<\/artifactId>\r\n\t\t<\/dependency>\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\nFor a successful conversion, your logs will contain:<\/p>\n
\r\n[main] INFO com.documents4j.conversion.msoffice.MicrosoftWordBridge - From-Microsoft-Word-Converter was started successfully\r\n[main] INFO com.documents4j.job.LocalConverter - The documents4j local converter has started successfully\r\n[pool-1-thread-1] INFO com.documents4j.conversion.msoffice.MicrosoftWordBridge - Requested conversion from input.docx (application\/vnd.com.documents4j.any-msword) to output.pdf (application\/pdf)\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Generating high fidelity PDF output from Office documents has always been a challenge, given the “long tail” of features which are possible in docx\/pptx\/xlsx files. For Word documents, it is easy enough to output paragraphs of text, tables and images. But add in VML, DrawingML, equations, SmartArt, and fidelity becomes a challenge. If your documents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.docx4java.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.docx4java.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.docx4java.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.docx4java.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.docx4java.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.docx4java.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":496,"href":"https:\/\/www.docx4java.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions\/496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.docx4java.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.docx4java.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.docx4java.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}