Pywin32 save .docx as pdf

Question

I'm using Word 2013 to automatically create a report as a docx and then save it as a pdf format.

But when I call the function SaveAs2(), the script pop 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 to 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'm using : python2.7 with pywin32 (build 219)

Does someone had an idea why it doesn't work?

Solution 1

There are a couple of nice libraries to handle this task:

• python-docx
• xtopdf

There is also an example of doing exactly this in this ActiveState Recipe Convert Microsoft Word files to PDF with DOCXtoPDF

---

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

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You could also do this using comtypes (Thanks to .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()

Solution 2

Looks like the "Office 2013" is the bottleneck.

I have the same issue while using Word 2013 ("Office 2013"),
but when I try to run your code snippet with "Office 365" and "Office 2010", it works.

I can recommend two solutions for now:

• try out different MS Office versions (365 and 2010 tested)
• use some online API-s to convert it to PDF

Note:
Changing the module/library won't fix the issue,
only the right Office version will.

Comments

[RenShan]

Hi James and thanks for your answer and your suggestion! I have tried your examples with comtypes and ActiveState but unfortunately, it creates the same trouble as above during the save part. As for python-docx, it doesn’t allow to save it as an pdf [document]( github.com/python-openxml/python-docx/issues/113) and all the other library doesn’t seem to take the docx header.

[Mau]

James, the python-docx library is great (already using it) but cannot be used to generate the PDF. You need a "renderer" to be able to do that.