Re: convert .doc to .pdf on linux

On 8 Mar 2007 08:33:28 -0800, Jistan Idiot wrote:
I have some rather complex Word documents with lists, checkboxes,
headers, and footers. I want to turn them into PDFs (and I eventually
want to automate the process with a Perl script). I'm on RHEL4.

The Word documents render fine in OpenOffice 2.x. However when I do
the export to PDF, the checkboxes get mangled. If you zoom in about
400% the checkboxes do appear correctly, but they need to appear
correctly at 100% since that's what most people are going to be
looking at. I tried looking at the PDFs on Windows with Acrobat
(thinking it might be an issue with xpdf) and they also appear mangled
there.

Next I tried using OO to print to a file and take the resulting ps
file and convert it to PDF. I checked with ggv and everything looked
good with the ps file. Ran ps2pdf (tried also ps2pdf14). The
resulting PDF again has the mangled checkboxes.

So the next plan was to try to take the ps file and use ImageMagick to
make the PDF. This got the checkboxes right, but it got the font way
off. Also the text seems to have been converted to an image in the
PDF and thus it can't be indexed by our indexing software. So
ImageMagick isn't a solution for us.

So the next plan was to try abiword. That failed to render the Word
document correctly at all. I pulled the wvWare stuff down separately
in hopes that I might get a newer version than what came with
abiword. However that had the same problem.

Now I'm out of options. Can anyone give me some more ideas?

I'd guess that the problem is with a Symbol font. Use pdffonts to see
what's embedded and try substituting an alternative in OO:

Options -> OpenOffice.org -> Fonts

Bob T.
.

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