Commandline XLS/DOC to PDF converting
by BenV on Apr.04, 2011, under Software
Since this took me 5 years to find through google, this is another reference post.
Converting word and/or excel documents to PDF format should be easy.
Unfortunately it takes Libreoffice (or whatever your variant is today), but it works:
$ libreoffice -headless -convert-to pdf /tmp/bla.xls
convert /tmp/bla.xls -> /tmp/bla.pdf using calc_pdf_Export
No garbage paid for converters needed, just garbage libreoffice.
Update: since libreoffice is still the same garbage as openoffice (maybe it’ll improve some day) I ran into this error
on my production machine:
$ libreoffice -headless -convert-to pdf /tmp/bla.xls
[Java framework] Error in function createSettingsDocument (elements.cxx).
javaldx failed!
Apparently this is caused by libreoffice wanting to do some garbage in its home directory. Except for my headless user doesn’t have a workable home.
Oh yeah, there’s a -nofirststartwizard option but it doesn’t help. This is solved by setting HOME to /tmp for instance:
$ HOME=/tmp libreoffice -headless -convert-to pdf /tmp/bla.xls
