Converting docx/odt to PDF using JavaScript
converters, javascript, jspdf, ms-word, node.js
Solution
As you already know there is no ready-to-use and open libs for this.. You just can't get good results with available variants. My suggesition is:
- Use third party API. Like https://market.mashape.com/convertapi/word2pdf-1#!documentation
Create your own service for this purpose. If you have such ability, I suggest to create a small server on node.js (I bet you know how to do this). You can use Libreoffice as a good converter with good render quality like this:
`libreoffice -headless -invisible -convert-to pdf {$file_name} -outdir /www-disk/`
Don't forget that this is usually takes a lot of time, do not block the request-answer flow: use separate process for each convert operation.
And the last thing. Libreoffice is not very lightweight but it has good quality. You can also find notable `unoconv` tool.
As of January 2019, there is docx-wasm, which works in node and performs the conversion locally where node is installed. Proprietary but freemium.
Problem
I have a node web app that needs to convert a docx file into pdf (using client side resources only and no plugins). I've found a possible solution by converting my docx into HTML using docxjs and then HTML to PDF using jspdf (docx->HTML->PDF). This solution could make it but I encountered several issues especially with rendering. I know that docxjs doesn't keep the same rendering in HTML as the docx file so it is a problem... So my question is do you know any free module/solution that could directly do the job without going through HTML (I'm open to odt as a source as well)? If not, what would you advise me to do? Thanks