[99112000]

I once had to help an accountant friend to fill in 1000's of docx files, and convert them to pdf. No open source tool does a proper conversion, it really sucked.

[chrisdbanks]

I once had to do this and turned all the docx into one document, used Word to export as PDF and then used a PDF splitter to get separate documents.

[coupdejarnac]

You could script Libre Office to do this.

[pbhjpbhj]

>No open source tool does a proper conversion //

Presumably the key word here is "proper" because LibreOffice, etc., read docx and write pdf. For example, `libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf myfile.docx`.

[forinti]

I have used Perl and Win32::OLE for this kind of job.

Converting to PDF is actually quite easy. Before Office 2010, you had to print to Postscript and then convert to PDF using Ghost. Nowadays Word gives you the option of saving to PDF.

[andylynch]

Yeah, this would be horrible, but on flip side relatively easy to do with Word to hand.

[thejosh]

it's such a complex messy format that i'm really not surprised.

[daemoens]

ilovepdf.com is free but isn't open source.