How to deal when MS Word 2004 (OSX) is freezing or displaying dialogs?

Question

Hi,

I'm using jRuby and a Java library (using itself an applescript to play with MS Word) to convert Word documents to PDF files. Sometimes I get a dialog about margins issues, or MS Word is freezing because the file is too big... Could anyone recommend a script or library that I could run on OSX to manage these issues (closing the dialog / restarting Word if not responding)? The problem is that I don't really know about applescript and the Java library is not opensource, so it can be an observer or something running another programming language, I don't really mind.

Thanks! Vincent

Answer 1

Hi Vincent.

I can't recommend a way of managing your word freezing issues, but another approach would be to use an OpenOffice-based system to do the conversion since OpenOffice runs under OSX and the OpenOffice import/export filters are pretty powerful (good enough for most purposes). Docmosis and JODReports can provide the Java/cmd-line interface to this capability or you could use OpenOffice UNO API directly (not the best option). To decide if it's a good approach, install OpenOffice (currently at version 3.2) and convert a few sample DOCs to PDF to see whether the results are good enough for your purposes. If so, then check out Docmosis and JODReports/JODConverter and see if they can give you what you want quickly enough.