Plutext

Recently I'm planning to develop a web service that could print any docx files to a printer.
By comparing many open source libraries (i.e. Apache POI, OpenOffice API, docx4j, etc), I choose docx4j to process docx files. However, I have no clue of how to process a docx file so that the printer could "recognize" it.
I'm a newbie here Do I need to convert the docx files to PDF or other format to do that?

Any suggestion is appreciate.
Thanks in advance!

Well, you'll need to convert the docx to a format a printer can recognise, eg ultimately, PCL or Postscript (though maybe this is abstracted away in your architecture?)

As an intermediate format, you can convert your docx to PDF or HTML (I assume you support those already).

If you are already using OpenOffice to print other file formats, I'd suggest you consider using it for docx as well.