Output Pcl From Word Document Using Python

I'm building a web application which will include functionality that takes MS Word (and possibly input from a web-based rich text editor) documents, substitutes values into the for

Solution 1:

Ghostscript can read PS (Postscript) or PDF and create PCL. You can use python libraries or just subprocess....

Solution 2:

OK, so my final solution involved creating a java webservice to perform my transcoding.

• Docx4j provides a class org.docx4j.convert.out.pdf.viaXSLFO.Conversion which hooks into apache FOP to convert Docx to PDF; that can be easily hacked to convert to PCL (because FOP outputs PCL)
• Spark is a lightweight java web framework which allowed me to wrap my transcoder in a web service
• Because I also manipulate the document, I need to have some metadata, so the perfect thing is a multipart form. I decode that using Apache Fileupload

In almost all cases, I had to upgrade to the development versions of libraries to get this to work.

On the python side I use:

• requests to communicate with the web service
• poster to prepare the multi-part request