Save Open XML as PDF

Call me biased, as I worked on this component, but the PDF Conversion Services are used by many small and large organisations to convert OpenXML as well as many other formats to PDF using a friendly Web Services interface.

Check out these examples:

• C# / .NET
• Java

The nice thing about the Office OpenXML is that it's the language of Microsoft Office -- if you live your "office life" in Word and Excel (2007 and later), that's the format you want.

Can you "save" OpenXML directly to PDF? No, it needs to be rendered by some third-party component.

If you're doing document generation on the server side and you don't need to be working with Office documents as output, you'd generally use something like iText or iTextSharp, which would render the PDFs directly.

I haven't worked with a server-side component that will do the translation from Office OpenXML to PDF, though.

There are various third party components for the OpenXML to PDF piece. I maintain the open source docx4j, which is one option.

If you are doing document generation, you may find you need repeats and conditionals. For suggestions on how to do this, see http://dev.plutext.org/svn/docx4j/trunk/docx4j/sample-docs/databinding/conventions.html