Converting docx to pdf with pure python (on linux, without libreoffice)

Another one you could use is libreoffice, however as the first responder said the quality will never be as good as using the actual comtypes.

anyways, after you have installed libreoffice, here is the code to do it.

from subprocess import  Popen
LIBRE_OFFICE = r"C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program\soffice.exe"

def convert_to_pdf(input_docx, out_folder):
    p = Popen([LIBRE_OFFICE, '--headless', '--convert-to', 'pdf', '--outdir',
               out_folder, input_docx])
    print([LIBRE_OFFICE, '--convert-to', 'pdf', input_docx])
    p.communicate()


sample_doc = 'file.docx'
out_folder = 'some_folder'
convert_to_pdf(sample_doc, out_folder)

The PythonAnywhere help pages offer information on working with PDF files here: https://help.pythonanywhere.com/pages/PDF

Summary: PythonAnywhere has a number of Python packages for PDF manipulation installed, and one of them may do what you want. However, shelling out to abiword seems easiest to me. The shell command abiword --to=pdf filetoconvert.docx will convert the docx file to a PDF and produce a file named filetoconvert.pdf in the same directory as the docx. Note that this command will output an error message to the standard error stream complaining about XDG_RUNTIME_DIR (or at least it did for me), but it still works, and the error message can be ignored.

Here is docx to pdf code for linux (for windows just download libreoffice and put soffice path instead of soffice)

import subprocess

def generate_pdf(doc_path, path):

    subprocess.call(['soffice',
                 # '--headless',
                 '--convert-to',
                 'pdf',
                 '--outdir',
                 path,
                 doc_path])
    return doc_path
generate_pdf("docx_path.docx", "output_path")