Batch convert Word documents to PDFs
This might be pushing it into stackoverflow.com territory, but you could script Word 2007 to open and save a document as PDF. This requires Office 2007 and the "Save as PDF" plug-in from Microsoft.
Save this to a file SaveAsPDF.js
and run it from the command line using cscript.exe //nologo SaveAsPDF.js SomeFolder\MyDocToConvert.doc
:
var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
var docPath = WScript.Arguments(0);
docPath = fso.GetAbsolutePathName(docPath);
var pdfPath = docPath.replace(/\.doc[^.]*$/, ".pdf");
var objWord = null;
try
{
WScript.Echo("Saving '" + docPath + "' as '" + pdfPath + "'...");
objWord = new ActiveXObject("Word.Application");
objWord.Visible = false;
var objDoc = objWord.Documents.Open(docPath);
var wdFormatPdf = 17;
objDoc.SaveAs(pdfPath, wdFormatPdf);
objDoc.Close();
WScript.Echo("Done.");
}
finally
{
if (objWord != null)
{
objWord.Quit();
}
}
This is how I would do it:
- Download CutePDF writer
- Set the writer as your default printer (you can change it back later)
- Place all your .doc files in the same folder
- Highlight all the files, right-click, Print
Only downside is that you have to click Ok once for each file.
well, cutepdf & pdf99 do their job well, but i find PDFcreator more appealing as it 'print's in higher quality than the other two, it also has more configuration option, plus it's open-source.