The easiest way to convert a Word document to PDF is to set up a special machine, with the default printer a PDF converter, and automate Word to print the document (via Win32::OLE).

Parsing and recreating Word input/output is not easily done - maybe you can also install and automate the OpenOffice.Org suite, which possibly can read *.doc files, and they for sure have an .pdf output option.

If you're in for a pure Perl solution, I fear that the closest thing available is SpreadSheet::ParseExcel, which should do most of the OLE-Stream parsing, but which will know nothing about Word...

Personally, I would tell the people to either upload an image, text or a PDF and thus put the burden of producing a suitable PDF file on them - it isn't hard with either a Mac or a Windows PC and even the Unix users should know how to coax their tool of choice to produce a suitable PDF.

perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web
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