I work for a company where documents need to be automatically created from Word templates; we produce thousands of these documents each day. In order to do this we have to automate the creation of Word content, and use 3rd party tools to get it to PDF format. We also convert Word docs that we receive from outside parties to PDFs. As you are probably well aware something as seeming simple sounding as this presents great challenges. We have developed some decent services that work remarkably well. But these services have to use Word automation which really negates system reliability, and consequently we have to baby these systems and constantly monitor them, so you could hardly call them industrial strength systems.

Well, this question really doesn't have anything to do with VSTO technology. OTOH there isn't any forum or newsgroup you can go to ask a question of this nature and get an answer from MS... This issue has been addressed in the current version of Word (2003) and the approach has been extended in the next version, currently in beta (2007). The XML document format allows you to construct Word documents without needing to automate the application. And they can be converted to PDF format using a transform.

I suggest you read the material about the Office XML file formats on the MSDN website. And read Brian Jone's blog (going back to the 2002 archives for the full story).

Outstanding! So generating word content on the sever realiably is finally going to be a reality, that covers half of my problem. Now regarding PDF conversion, I examined that blog and noted the MS ~ Adobe dispute, so now i'm confused...Is Office 2007 going to support PDF export? If so would it require the automation of the Word GUI on the server (I pray not!!!) or will there be a more simple way? In your post you mention "using a transform" how does that work exactly?

Thanks

Hypercoder wrote:

Outstanding! So generating word content on the sever realiably is finally going to be a reality, that covers half of my problem. Now regarding PDF conversion, I examined that blog and noted the MS ~ Adobe dispute, so now i'm confused...Is Office 2007 going to support PDF export? If so would it require the automation of the Word GUI on the server (I pray not!!!) or will there be a more simple way? In your post you mention "using a transform" how does that work exactly?

To use the "Save as PDF", you'd have to automate Word, yes.

But there's nothing to stop you from transforming the Word XML to PDF's XML. I believe there are already third-party tools available for this (for the Word 2003 XML, in any case). And there's nothing to stop you from designing your own transform. Here's a third-party tool I saw advertised in a newsgroup, a few months ago, just as an example

"Altsoft Xml2PDF is a .NET based formatting engine for converting various XML-based formats to PDF. It supports XSL-FO, SVG, XHTML, WordML and XML+XSLT as an input and generates PDF as an output."

This is officially not supported as the application isnt designed to work without interactive use and as such the Excel team and Infopath team are working on providing server services for this type of interaction with the Office 2007 release but without reverting to using 3rd party tools such as Aspose or TxControl the options are very limited albeit these two products are getting better and better.

Regards