Kevin Martin wrote:
What I'm trying to do is convert a bunch of Excel files to PDF. I can open the Excel files in oocalc and export to PDF but I've been reading that you can do this same thing by using Cups-PDF and "soffice -pt "Cups-PDF" file.xls' and it will fire up oocalc and, essentially, use the Cups-PDF "printer" to save the file out as a .pdf file. Well, that's not working for me. I never get an output file when I run the command from the command line and I can't figure out why. I'm running on Fedora 8 with the latest openoffice, cups, cups-pdf rpms for that platform. Can somebody else try on their end and see if it works for them? FWIW, "soffice -p file.xls" doesn't print my file to the default printer either.
Thanks.
Kevin
There are several tricks to this. First, to do it remotely, or from an associated command line, you need to fun a fake X server and set the display to that.
Second, you need to set up a macro to do exactly what you want when evoked, and that includes writing of the output.
I cannot include the macro here because I did not write it.
We use:
Xvfb -pixdepths 8 24 -fbdir /usr/tmp
Here is a script (which I wrote) we use on a web based tool to convert MS files:
#!/bin/bash
if [ -z "$1" ] then echo "Usage: $0 <file.doc>" exit -1 fi
DISPLAY=:0 export DISPLAY
# macro is in: ~/.openoffice.org2.0/user/basic/Standard/Module1.xba
DOC=$1
/usr/bin/oowriter -invisible "macro:///Standard.Module1.ConvertWordToPDF($DOC)"
exit $?
Good Luck!