Converting MSWord Docs to PDF

[Andrew McLean]

Steve Holden wrote:
> If that *isn't* satisfactory then a modest investment in Adobe 
> Acrobat/Distiller plus the use of Python's scripting facilities to 
> direct the conversion would be preferable to spending a huge amount of 
> time writing a hand-crafted solution.

An alternative to Adobe Distiller (part of Acrobat) is PDFCreator

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

which is free. This installs as a Windows printer (using GhostScript as 
a backend to generate PDFs). It should be relatively straightforward to 
use Python scripting to drive Word to "print" documents to the 
PDFCreator pseudo-printer.