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Currently looking into a requirement for using workflows to solve some of the manual processes for approvals / publishing. One manual process is to convert the approved Word document to a PDF (Binary), before publishing. I am looking at alternatives to achieve this using workflows in Tridion as well.

  • Are there any PDF Rendering engines or libraries that integrate fairly well with SDL Tridion for the above purpose?
  • Are there any add-on modules from SDL that accomplish this?
  • Has anyone worked on an enterprise level solution for the above requirement?

Sometimes Google is our best buddy :) . Any thoughts and feedback is appreciated!

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    Do consider that any service you use may still benefit form a well thought out and implemented workflow given the PDF content should me reviewed and acknowledged as such (if, as it implied given your mention of workflow, the organisation already uses workflow). You could easily put the workflow into a suspended state, send for/create the PDF, re-activate workflow to have someone sign-off acceptance of the suitability of the PDF.
    – Dylan .. Mark Saunders
    Commented Jan 19, 2016 at 21:13
  • If possible, and especially if you can change the Word requirement to Web content, consider pushing the rendition towards publishing or delivery, rather than a CM-side integration. This could mean less CM-logic and editorial work.
    – Alvin Reyes
    Commented Jan 20, 2016 at 9:55

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I've used Apache FOP (yes, I'm dating myself) and other solutions in the past like a html-2-pdf open source tool that died shortly after.

Since all you need is the ability to call this service from c#, your options are pretty much open. There's tools like iText that seem to fit this requirement quite well, or you can go straight into 2016 and use Noxum's "PDF as a Service" offer on Azure :)

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  • +1. I had a team use iText as well, but the PDF was generated after publishing to an XML file format.
    – Alvin Reyes
    Commented Jan 20, 2016 at 9:51
  • Thanks for the feedback Nuno. We are nowhere close to Azure yet but would like to get there, eventually :)...
    – Shiva
    Commented Jan 20, 2016 at 17:07
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- U P D A T E : -

Your question does imply from Word to PDF - if this is the case then you can easily use the Word Save As add-on (there are other options - note the version of Word is likely a dependancy) and there's a good example here.

Original Answer Assumed publishing directly to PDF So, this is an age-old question of (m)any CMS!

Back in Tridion 2009 (I do see you're on 2013) there were Tridion modules... http://sdltridionworld.com/community/extension_overview/pdf_creator.aspx http://sdltridionworld.com/releases/release_news/connector_2009_for_indesign_released.aspx

And then into the recent years there are services mentioned from Nuno and others to consider are listed below (taken from the detailed post here by Pankaj

  • iTextSharp
  • wkhtmltopdf
  • ExpertPDF
  • QuickPDF Library
  • ABCpdf
  • DynamicPDF
  • PDFSharp

You can also integrate with Office and save a Word document as PDF - depends just how structured your content is

Perhaps you can try a couple and post any specific questions you might have in another post?

As noted above, do consider that any service you use will still benefit from

  • a well thought out and
  • implemented workflow given the PDF content
  • should be reviewed and acknowledged as such

Moreso in your case as the organisation already uses workflow - you could easily put the workflow into a suspended state, send for/create the PDF, re-activate workflow to have someone sign-off acceptance of the suitability of the PDF.

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  • Thanks for the feedback Dylan. I will keep the question open for a couple of days for any more feedback before closing it! Much appreciated :)
    – Shiva
    Commented Jan 20, 2016 at 17:05

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