I was thinking more along the lines of being able to set up an application where a user can click on a document (Word format for instance) on their computer to upload it to the server. After uploading, convert it to PDF on the server (in an automated fashion so I don't have to manually go through the uploaded files each day and convert them to PDF).

In theory, the OpenOffice.org suite of programs can do that, and in theory, these programs are also automatable. I say in theory because these programs need to be scripted either in their own, weird StarBASIC programming language or through an object model that is weird and unusable even for the standards of Java Object Model Designers. It would be a project producing many thanks if somebody made the filters of OOo into stand-alone converter programs, but the OOo build process is rather unapproachable.

I've had OK luck using the Python OO.org automation stuff that's available. It interfaces with the same whacked out object model as the Java stuff, but it wasn't too hard to get it to convert an .sxc spreadsheet into an Excel file with some luck and experimenting. Granted it's still not Perl, but it's not hard to pick up enough *shudder* Python to get something working.

Although OpenOffice.org is hard to work with, if you're putting together a static task, then I think you should look at that option. Then, if you're really nice, you could wrap that task in a Perl module and upload it to CPAN. :-)

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