No there really isn’t and we would know .. at Orangedox we convert many different types of files to PDF and we use a variety of tools to accomplish this. If you’re looking to convert an MS Office document (Word, Powerpoint, Excel) then I’d highly recommend looking at OpenOffice or LibreOffice. T both have command line utilities that allow you to convert from Office and open document formats to PDF. However, t can be tricky to implement in an automated process, namely because t only allow for one document to be processed at a time.
As a solution we’ve created a small script to automate this task. This guide will show you the steps to follow to set up an Apache configuration, then add a simple script to open PDF documents with an existing LibreOffice installation. This guide is for Linux, however there are a couple of ways you can use Python to handle PDF output when you haven’t just configured Apache so that it can handle this. Now the Python API does a better job by handling compression, image manipulation and more, however, it has the following limitations: A single Python script only works if the document contains no embedded images. If you must support images in your documents then you must use a program like Scribes which can automatically generate the needed image files. As a solution we’ve created a small python package which allows you to create a PDF file from any python.