to_pdf {doconv}

Convert documents to pdf

Description

Convert documents to pdf with a script using 'Office' or 'Libre Office'.

If 'Microsoft Word' and 'Microsoft PowerPoint' are available, files 'docx', 'doc', 'rtf' and 'pptx' will be converted to PDF with 'Office' via a script.

If 'Microsoft Word' and 'Microsoft PowerPoint' are not available (on linux for example), 'Libre Office' will be used to convert documents. In that case the rendering can be different from the original document. It supports very well 'Microsoft PowerPoint' to PDF. 'Microsoft Word' can also be converted but some Word features are not supported, such as sections.

Usage

to_pdf(
  input,
  output = gsub("\\.[[:alnum:]]+$", ".pdf", input),
  timeout = 120,
  UserInstallation = NULL
)

Arguments

input, output

file input and optional file output. If output file is not provided, the value will be the value of input file with extension 'pdf'.

timeout

timeout in seconds, ignored if 0.

UserInstallation

use this value to set a non-default user profile path for 'LibreOffice'. If not provided a temporary dir is created. It makes possibles to use more than a single session of 'LibreOffice'.

Value

the name of the produced pdf (the same value as output), invisibly.

Ubuntu platforms

On some Ubuntu platforms, 'LibreOffice' require to add in the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH the following path: ⁠/usr/lib/libreoffice/program⁠ (you should see the message "libreglo.so cannot open shared object file" if it is the case). This can be done with R command Sys.setenv(LD_LIBRARY_PATH = "/usr/lib/libreoffice/program/")

Examples

library(locatexec)
if (exec_available("libreoffice") && check_libreoffice_export()) {

  out_pptx <- tempfile(fileext = ".pdf")
  file <- system.file(package = "doconv",
    "doc-examples/example.pptx")

  to_pdf(input = file, output = out_pptx)

  out_docx <- tempfile(fileext = ".pdf")
  file <- system.file(package = "doconv",
    "doc-examples/example.docx")

  to_pdf(input = file, output = out_docx)

}