Pywin32 save.docx as pdf

Question

I use Word 2013 to automatically generate a report as docx and then save it in pdf format.

But when I call the SaveAs2 () function, the script pulls out the Save As windows and throws this exception:

(-2147352567, 'Exception occurred.', (0, u'Microsoft Word', u'Command failed', u'wdmain11.chm', 36966, -2146824090), None) 

Here is my code to open and save as a new file:

 self.path = os.path.abspath(path) self.wordApp = win32.Dispatch('Word.Application') #create a word application object self.wordApp.Visible = False # if false hide the word application (app does't open but still usable) self.document = self.wordApp.Documents.Open(self.path + "/" + documentRef) # opening the template file absFileName = "D:\\test.pdf" self.document.SaveAs2(FileName=absFileName,FileFormat=17) 

And I use: python2.7 with pywin32 (build 219)

Does anyone have an idea why this is not working?

Answer 1

There are some good libraries to solve this problem:

• python-docx
• xtopdf

There's also an example of just that in this ActiveState recipe. Convert Microsoft Word files to PDF with DOCXtoPDF

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If you insist on using the Windows API (s), there is also an example of this using win32com in this recipe Convert doc and docx files to PDF

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You can also do this using comtypes (thanks .doc to pdf using Python )

Example:

 import os import sys import comtypes.client wdFormatPDF = 17 def covx_to_pdf(infile, outfile): """Convert a Word .docx to PDF""" word = comtypes.client.CreateObject('Word.Application') doc = word.Documents.Open(infile) doc.SaveAs(outfile, FileFormat=wdFormatPDF) doc.Close() word.Quit()