django/python: How to convert pptx/docx formats to PDF using python?

Question

First of all, I agree that this might sound like a question which has already been asked many times in the past. However I couldn't find any answer that was relevant to me in the similar questions so I'll try to be more specific.

I would need to transform PPTX/DOCX files into PDF using Python but I don't have any experience in file format conversion. I have been looking in many places/forums/websites, read a lot of documentation and came across some useful libraries ( python-pptx and pyPdf mainly), but I still don't know where to start.

When looking on the Internet, I can see many websites that offer file format conversions as a paying service, even with advanced API's: submit a file via POST and get the transformed PDF file in return. This could work for me, but I am really interested in writing myself the code that does the conversion work from OOXML to PDF.

How would you start doing this? Or is it just impossible on my own?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

After some research and with the help of python-pptx's creator, I was able to write to the PowerPoint COM interface using a Virtual Machine.

In case someone reads this thread, this is how I managed to get this done: - Setup a VM with Microsoft Windows/Office installed on it ; - Install Python, Django and win32com libraries on the VM.

The files are sent locally from the original Django project to the virtual machine (which are on the same network) through a simple POST request. The file is converted on the VM using win32com.client (which is just a simple call to the win32com.client library) and then sent back as a response to the original Django view, which in turn processes the response.

Note: it took me some time to realize I needed to use the @csrf_exempt decorator for this setup to work.