Note: Please note that 'Email to PDF conversion' is supported by callas pdfaPilot. Futher information here.

• All Office-applications should be installed with the default options, in order to guarantee that all needed components are available.
• Install all the latest updates.
• Start the application at least once and make sure that the setup wizards have been executed successfully.
• pdfToolbox  need to be activated. This means, a valid activation request must have been sent and the software must have been activated with the activation file received afterwards.
• The activation needs to be performed for the user who wants to execute the file conversion.
• On Windows systems, install the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 4 or newer - this is not automatically installed with the regular Windows Update but belongs to the optional updates.
• Please ensure, that the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio (2013, 2017, 2019) were properly installed by the callas installation package. Available here.
• While conversions to PDF are performed, no other users on this machine should use the applications needed for this process.
• In particular the file to be processed should not be opened in the respective application.
• Only one instance of the application that creates PDF must be used at the same time. Therefore in pdfToolbox Server or in Enfocus Switch the number of instances needs to be set to 1.

• Although some file types can be processed with several applications it is recommended to process documents with the application where they were created with.
• Microsoft Office files are not processed via OpenOffice/LibreOffice by default under Windows and MacOS if no Microsoft Office is installed on the system. For Server/CLI, processing of such MS Office files by OpenOffice/LibreOffice can be forced using the --topdf_forceopenoffice parameter.

• Please make sure that Microsoft Office is activated. In case Microsoft Office runs as an evaluation version, a warning dialog might pop up during conversion.
• Install the latest service pack for Microsoft Office.
• When updating the Microsoft Office Suite it is recommended to deinstall previously installed version before to ensure all registry entries are removed and properly set when the new installation of Office takes place. Especially when installing Microsoft Office 2010 on a system with an existing Microsoft Office 2007 such registry entries seems to remain. See Microsoft knowledge base for details how to uninstall.

Word

Word documents may contain annotations from the function “Track changes”. They are output into the PDF with the setting “Screen”. When outputting with setting “Print” they are not output. In the Desktop version of pdfToolbox the setting “Print” is default so that annotations are not output. Whereas in pdfaPilot Desktop the setting “Screen” is default so that annotations are output. On the Mac the output of annotations can only be omitted when running the english language version of Word. Moreover “Enable access for assistive devices” need to be enabled in “Universal Access” of the “System preferences”.

Excel

• If the contents exceed the “print area”, only the parts covered by this “print area” will be output whilst the other parts will not be output.
• The page format of the output PDF is optimized in order to fit as much content as possible in a well readable way onto a page. For large sheets the content may be spread over several PDF pages.
• To ensure conversion, the print spooler has to be active. This is the case when the Excel preview shows the content. Otherwise the spooler has to be started in the “Services” configuration of the system settings. After doing this, the “Microsoft XPS Document Writer” shows up in the print dialog of Excel.

PowerPoint

It is not recommended to use parallel conversion of PowerPoint files with MS Office, as this can sometimes lead to problems, instead sequential processing works stable.

Mac

• A page range can not be specified, the parameter Page range (pagerange) does not have an influence.
• Images are exported with a resolution of 72 ppi, the parameter Print (topdf_print) does not have an influence.
• If Microsoft Office 2008 and Microsoft Office 2011 are installed the Office application that is set as default for opening Office documents in the system or the Office application that is already open is used to process Office documents.

Dialog handling

• Under Windows dialogs appearing in the Office application during processing can be handled.
• Therefore an empty file named MTPGuiActions.log has to be placed in the user folder here:
• <user>\AppData\Roaming\axaio software\MS Office 12\MadeToPrint\Logfiles\
• If the Office document that opens a dialog is processed now an ID of the dialog is logged in MTPGuiActions.log
• This ID needs to be entered in MTPGuiActions.cfg which can be found in the etc/PDFOfficeTool folder next to the executable of pdfToolbox Desktop or Server
• Within MTPGuiActions.cfg the options of the dialog handling is described

Usage when running as a service

Sometimes problems may occure when running pdfToolbox as a service with Microsoft Office. Automation is not supported by Microsoft officially, but the following workaround was successful in most cases:

• Create the following folders (with appropriate permissions) on your system:
  • Windows Server 2012 + later:
    • C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache
  • Especially when running Office 32Bit on x64 systems, the following folders are required as well:
    • Windows x64: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\Desktop
    • Windows x86: C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\Desktop
    • Please NOTE:
      For smooth operation, the folders named above need to be restored after a Windows Update.
• For the Office/Excel conversion in a service setting, it is necessary to set up a default printer, especially when working with the "System" account.
• For Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint the DCOM Identity "The launching user" must be selected. For Microsoft Visio the DCOM Identity "The interactive user" needs to be selected.

• Close all open OpenOffice and LibreOffice instances before processing with pdfToolbox.
• Please keep in mind the known restrictions of OpenOffice.org regarding cases where umlauts from Type1 and OpenType fonts might not be output correctly. You will find more information on the current state of this issue on OpenOffice.org.
• Only LibreOffice or OpenOffice may be installed.
• For Windows only the 32-bit versions of LibreOffice and OpenOffice are supported (before pdfToolbox 11/pdfEngine 11).
  
• From pdfToolbox 11/pdfEngine 11 onwards with the 64bit variant on Windows, the Libre/OpenOffice has to be 64bit as well (and 32bit when the 32bit variant of pdfToolbox/pdfEngine is installed).
• For Non-Windows systems (Mac, Linux..) the JDK needs to be installed: https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase-jdk14-downloads.html

Mac

Please verify that OpenOffice is installed inside the default installation path (e.g. ”/Applications/OpenOffice.org” on Mac OS X systems).

If it is not, please re-install it to this location.

On Mac the following default installation/location are supported (in this order - first wins):

• /Applications/LibreOffice.app
• /Applications/OpenOffice.app
• /Applications/OpenOffice.org.app

Linux

• Support for Office Conversion has been tested thoroughly on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Server) with the default installation of LibreOffice and also with an OpenOffice installation.
• On Debian based Linux distributions (like Ubuntu or Mint), the required LibreOffice packages are installed via the package manager or via the command line as shown below:
  • sudo aptitude install libreoffice
  • (please substitute 'libreoffice' by 'openoffice' if you prefer OpenOffice)
• On other linux distributions or with other OS versions it might be required to search for packages with different names. E.g install everything found with the following search terms:
  • libreoffice (or openoffice)
  • uno
  • ure
  • headless
• Some distributions, like e.g. Debian 10 ("Buster") may require to install the additional "libreoffice-java-common" package:
  • sudo apt install libreoffice-java-common

• A page range can not be specified as it is also via manual PDF export, the parameter Page range (pagerange) does not have an influence.
• Images are exported with a resolution of 72 ppi as it is also via manual PDF export, the parameter Print (topdf_print) does not have an influence.
• Documents of iWork '08 Pages can not be processed with pdfToolbox Server application because of a changed file format (file packages of Pages version 3 and earlier).

• ICC profiles referenced in a PDF settings file (.joboptions) need to be copied into the operating system folder for ICC profiles, e.g.:
  • Windows:
    C:\Windows\system32\spool\drivers\color
  • MacOS:
    /MacOS HD/Library/ColorSync/Profiles
• The application will also look into the following folders for ICC profiles: 
  • /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/Profiles/Recommended
  • /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/Profiles
  • /System/Library/ColorSync/Profiles
• Alternatively, you can put ICC-files for PostScript to PDF in the subfolder of the application:
            .../etc/PDFPSTool/ICCProfiles
• A Color settings file (.csf) that is referenced in the PDF settings file is not necessary for the processing.

In general, it is recommended to grant the respective service user administrator privileges. If this level of rights cannot be set due to internal regulations, some additional settings within the operating system are recommended.

The following folders should allow the user the respective access right:

Additional settings

• Set the 32-bit folder preferences (detailed above) in addition to the 64-bit preferences on 64-bit systems running 64-bit versions of Microsoft Office
• Set the default printer to XPS Document Writer

DCOM settings

• Launch DCOMCNFG by using:C:\WINDOWS\SysWOW64> mmc comexp.msc /32
• Go to Computers > MyComputer > DCOM Config.
• Right-click the application that you want to automate.The application names are listed in the table below:

• On some systems Microsoft Word is not displayed and you will have to use {00020906-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} instead.
• Click Properties to open the property dialog box for this application.
• Verify Identity and Security tabs

Some customers experienced long processing times on maschines without an Internet connection, especially when using MS Office 365 or MS Office 2016/2019.
The following registry key did the trick for them:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\ClientTelemetry] "DisableTelemetry"=dword:00000001
This might be related to:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/DeployOffice/compat/manage-the-privacy-of-data-monitored-by-telemetry-in-office
We haven't found if there are official settings available - therefore we recommend an intensive testing on such systems before this key is used in a production environment as we can not estimate if there are any side effects.

In case you are having trouble with 'Convert to PDF', please contact our support team and simply fill out this form.