Automated PDF Conversion

I need to convert 127000+ documents from Corel Word Perfect to PDF. Just curious if anyone has used any 3rd party tools for mass conversions.

Wow.
And you can't use Word, huh?
I would *think* you oughtta be able to open each one in Word and print to PDF.

The conversion is poopoo for anything complex. :(

Sorry. Dunno what you mean...

The conversion from Word Perfect to Word rarely works in the case of documents with complex formatting. And, automating from Word requires the conversion. Most complex documents need to be manually recreated (3rd party software excepted) and I need to convert a bunch of legal proceedings to a format in which they can be read, which is why PDF was chosen.

Sure, but I think this is BS:
>>conversion from Word Perfect to Word rarely works in the case of documents with complex formatting.

I rarely have a problem at all. There's also a few tips, like changing continuous section breaks to next page (or vice-versa, I forget).

I've been dealing with this for the last two months. If there is some way to make Word read WP or get WP to save to .doc format in something that Word can actually use (when talking about complex documents), then I'm all ears. To date, I've seen literally thousands of documents that looked like trash after conversion. My client has spent lots of money paying temporaries to convert these documents, so if I could offer an alternative, I'd be much obliged, and the citizens of a certain city would welcome the decreased tax burden. ;)

Is there any way I can get a couple samples?

Also the version(s) of WP that was used.

Gimme an email addy. I don't have any copies at home, but I'm sure I can find numerous examples of documents without confidential data to send to you.

BTW, I wasn't exaggerating when I said thousands. Simply put, the majority don't convert. Images are inverted, merge fields are lost, tables with header rows are lost, etc etc. From my experience, the default conversion between these two apps...not so good. ;)

Version is WP 10 to MSO 2003.

k. Anne@
this website. :)

Okay, I'll send them to you tomorrow. Thanks for your willingness to help. If you could solve the conversion issue, it would be oh so helpful.

On that note, I still need to convert these documents to PDFs, so I'm all ears for other potential solutions. :)

:)

You're dreamy. ;)

Here's an update. It turns out there are closer to 150,000 WP documents. I downloaded a half dozen evaluation copies of converters, but for various reasons, none were satisfactory, so I gave up and decided to script it myself.

WP supports VBA, so I'm opening each of these documents individually and sending each to adobe pdf with distiller set not to prompt for a file name and location. By default, it preserves the named of the WP document. Unfortunately, documents with the same name reside in different directories, so I'm having to process each directory one at a time so I have the opportunity to move the pdfs into the directory where I want them to avoid overwrites.

I'm sure there are probably other ways to do this, but I've already gotten a PC that will be dedicated to running this until it's complete. Anyone want to take a bet on the total numbers of hours to convert these documents? :rotlaugh: