Batch convert OLD Word .docs to .pdf

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Level 2

367 points

Batch convert OLD Word .docs to .pdf

I have a lot of MS Word documents from the 1990s that do not open in Pages. (I get an error message saying the document "can't be opened".) I no longer have any version of Word on my MBP, so I right-click and open with TextEdit, and get a version of the document with lots of formatting problems. Some lines of copy even appear vertical instead of horizontal. They won't open in Preview or Adobe Acrobat, and changing their file name to .rtf doesn't work either.

Is there some way I can batch convert these old Word docs to PDFs? Or Page docs? Or anything that I can read easily?

Thanks in advance.

Posted on Jun 26, 2014 9:02 PM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

127,838 points

Jun 27, 2014 6:36 AM in response to Roger Barre

There are a couple of approaches.

Download the free LibreOffice and use that to open your older Word documents. I just opened and converted a 1997 Word doc into a PDF that looked identical to the original content. Neither Pages v5.2 or Preview on Mavericks would touch this document. This gives you the option of converting these older Word docs to PDF on demand. Once you open the Word document, there is a one-button PDF on the toolbar. LibreOffice installs everything in /Applications/LibreOffice.app.

LibreOffice also has a command-line feature in the Terminal that can convert any understandable document format into PDF. I have this set up as a Bash shell function, so all I have to type in the Terminal is: word2pdf filename.doc (or .docx) and a PDF is generated in the same location retaining the document name. The command-line LibreOffice capability can be scripted in AppleScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, and shell scripts to loop through files in a folder and convert them in place. The business end of this command syntax below. The outdir can be omitted if you want conversion in place.

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to pdf:writer_pdf_Export --outdir /pathname foo.doc

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