.NET Library for Converting MS Publisher Files to PDF?

Question

I have a client who saves a lot of newsletters in Microsoft Publisher 2007. They want to be able to archive these in pdf format on a website which I'm building. Aside from having them be forced to export the file to pdf from Publisher then upload it to our site for archival, is there any library out there that can help me convert Publisher files into PDFs? This way the user could simply upload the Publisher file to the site and I could convert it on the server then archive it.

Answer 1

Publisher can save to post script

Answer 2

This is a bit of a hack, but if you install Primo PDF, you can then save anything as a PDF by printing it and choosing the (virtual) Primo PDF printer that will now appear on the list of printers. Should be easy to access this via code as you are basically printing the Publisher document (but would require an instance of Publisher on your site).

Answer 3

Publisher 2007 can save files to PDF. If that feature isn't installed, there is a free add-in from Microsoft.

The advantage of using Microsoft's PDF publish feature is if you use any links they will come through in the PDF. Acrobat and some third party PDF tools can convert a web URL to PDF (i.e. http://somewebsite.com), however, if in the Publisher file you hyperlink a piece of test like "download here" and "here" is linked to http://somewebsite.com/file, Microsoft's publish process will build a PDF with the linked text actually having a hyperlink. Many if not all third party PDF publishers will turn the text blue, but because it isn't a URL there will be no link.

I highly recommend using the Microsoft Publisher's built in PDF publishing tool, I use it for my newsletters.

(I too went back and publish a bunch of old newsletters into PDF so people can access them on the web and I thought of looking for a way to script the keystrokes to publish to PDF, but in the end it was just faster to do them manually.)

Also, when publishing PDF from Publisher, the PDF document properties will be inherited from the Publisher file's document properties. This may be useful because if your newsletter was made like mine, the previous month's file was copied for the current month. In that case, they would all have the same metadata properties and if searched may appear indistinguishable from each other. When I PDFed my old files, I put in the document properties the month of the issue so if searched they could tell them apart.

I hope this helps, and hopefully you don't have too many to PDF.