Headless file conversion using LibreOffice as a service

Posted 02-12-2013 at 10:16 PM by sag47
Updated 02-12-2013 at 10:38 PM by sag47

The content outlined here also works for OpenOffice. This post was inspired by a question I was answering on the forums.

System Setup
I installed LibreOffice packages using a PPA in Kubuntu. Here is information about my environment.

Code:

Tue Feb 12 23:00:54 EST 2013
Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS
Linux 3.2.0-37-generic x86_64 GNU/Linux
GNU bash, version 4.2.24(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
LibreOffice 3.5 (Version: 1:3.5.4-0ubuntu1.1)
unoconv 0.4
Python 2.7.3
gcc (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5) 4.6.3

You must have libreoffice and unoconv installed to proceed. soffice is in my $PATH. Depending one which office version you're using you may need soffice.bin instead.

Converting your first document

Let's start with the goal of converting a single document. Let's say we want to convert the following html document into a PDF (test.html).

Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>This is a test</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is my title</h1>
<p>This is some text in the page</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gleske.net/">Visit Gleske Homepage</a></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.tldp.org/">Linux Documentation Project</a></li>
<li>This is some text in a bullet.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.gimp.org/">GIMP, An image manipulation program!</a></li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>

For this step you'll need to make use of either the program screen or simply open two terminals. Open the first terminal and start the LibreOffice service.

Code:

soffice --nologo --headless --nofirststartwizard --accept='socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=2220,tcpNoDelay=1;urp'

Now convert test.html into test.pdf. With unoconv you can connect to the LibreOffice API through the network socket and use the existing service to do the heavy lifting.

Code:

unoconv --connection 'socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=2220,tcpNoDelay=1;urp;StarOffice.ComponentContext' -f pdf test.html

If all goes well you should now see test.pdf in the same directory as test.html. You can use name globbing to specify multiple files like *.html.

To see a list of formats unoconv supports with the -f option run the command.

Code:

unoconv --show
#grep for certain formats
unoconv --show 2>&1 1>/dev/null | grep pdf

Daemonize the LibreOffice service
You could start the LibreOffice daemon (as the current user) with the following command.

Code:

soffice --nologo --headless --nofirststartwizard --accept='socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=2220,tcpNoDelay=1;urp;StarOffice.Service'

It will now run until a shutdown command for the service has been issued. To issue a shutdown command do the following.

Code:

soffice --nologo --headless --nofirststartwizard --unaccept='socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=2220,tcpNoDelay=1;urp;StarOffice.Service'

That's it! You could also alternatively start the service as another user like so (in this case the user is "sam")...

Code:

sudo su - sam -c "soffice --nologo --headless --nofirststartwizard --accept='socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=2220,tcpNoDelay=1;urp;StarOffice.Service'"

Pretty cool LibreOffice tricks I learned today. If you want to know more then look up the LibreOffice/OpenOffice API. That is technically what is being used. Also, you could google terms like "StarOffice.Service" or "StarOffice.ComponentContext".

SAM

Headless file conversion using LibreOffice as a service

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