Converting to PDF with Alfresco

Brief note that explains how to set-up Alfreso to transform various document formats to PDF. I am writing this because I didn’t find it particularly easy to track down how to do it; it involves a lot of digging around in the wiki. Hopefully, this note will make it easier to set-up.

By default Alfresco will convert PDF, Word documents etc to plain text but if you want to go the other around, e.g. transform plain text to PDF, you need to start Open Office from the command line – a version of Open Office comes bundled with Alfresco. It’s easy really: just run the start_oo.sh script, which you will find in the Alfresco home directory. Once you have done this you should be able to transform documents to PDF.

You can check that Open Office is running by executing the command lsof -i | grep 8100. If you start Open Office manually, note that Alfresco expects Open Office to be running on port 8100.

There’s a whole page on starting Open Office from the command line on the Alfresco wiki. Not sure why the page needs to be so long. I just ran the start_oo.sh script and Open Office started up without any problems. Maybe I got lucky!

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