How to convert an OpenOffice document to PDF from the Linux command line

command lineopenofficepdf

I have students who, when asked for PDF, sometimes hand me an OpenOffice document or spreadsheet. file(1) can identify these documents, but I've been unable to discover how to convert them to PDF using the command line. (The man page for ooffice(1) lists an option to print a document but not to convert to PDF.) Google is unhelpful, except for giving me the uneasy feeling that this can't be done without a nifty script in a language I don't know against an API whose documentation I can't find.

Can anyone help me solve the problem of converting an OpenDocument to PDF using only the Unix command line?

Best Answer

I think the most straightforward way would be to setup a pdf printer on your box and then just:

ooffice -pt pdfprinter studentwhodoesntfollowdirectionswell.odt

Edit: Just found a post on the Ubuntu forums with someone who arrived at the same solution I suggested (with handy dandy instructions). printing to pdf from command line [SOLVED]

Edit 2: I just came across unoconv which is a python script that uses OOo's UNO bindings. So I just wanted to update this answer

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djvu2pdf should fit the bill, it's a small script that makes use of the djvulibre toolset. If not, there are other methods that require multiple command-line tools.

Use OpenOffice from command line to convert HTML to RTF

There is a really handy shell script called unoconv that handles conversion of any files from and to any file format that OpenOffice/LibreOffice supports. You can read up about it on its site and be sure to check out the man page. Many distros have packages for it that you can install easily, including, I believe, cygwin.

Once you have it installed, usage in your case would mean specifying an input html file and an output rtf file like this:

unoconv file.html file.rtf

All done :)

Of course this could be scripted to handle multiple file situations as well. If you are using zsh, you could run something like this to convert a whole folder of html files:

for file in *html; do
    unoconv "$file" "${file/html/rtf}"
done

Best Answer

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Use OpenOffice from command line to convert HTML to RTF

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