Converting a folder of Word documents to PDFs

Software
1

Hi all,

I’m looking for an efficient way of converting a folder of Word files into PDFs on my Mac so I can read and annotate them later on my iPad. Any advice? Is this finally my excuse to get PDFPen? I’d like to stay away from Adobe products if possible.

Thanks!

2

Are you looking to automate this, or is the number of documents small enough that you could do it manually? If you’re looking to do it manually, you can just print it as a PDF.

David has a nice keyboard shortcut that makes printing as a PDF easy.

3

Thanks. That’s my usual way of getting PDFs from Word documents, but I was hoping to automate it, as I will be doing this a lot.

I was thinking maybe Hazel is an option somehow?

4

This is a rather lengthy thread over at the KM forums.

It includes a few Scripts that can be converted to a droplet and placed inside the Finder toolbar, for you to select Word docs, and drop onto the droplet to convert in batch.

That said, with the script, you can probably run it from any number of places, including Hazel.
I haven’t used it for several years, and hoping the latests macOS versions haven’t killed it, but it worked a charm back then.

Might be useful - the KM users were really helpful in fixing what I had found initially.

[I decided not to include the script here, since I think anyone would be better off reading what is said over at the KM forum, to better understand the context!]

5

LibreOffice to the rescue. If you have a folder full of .docx (in this example WordStuff on the Desktop), just run the terminal command:

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --convert-to pdf ~/Desktop/WordStuff/*.docx

That’s it. Can be integrated into Hazel or whatever.

3 Likes
6

I’d recommend Pandoc. Its whole purpose is document conversions like that.

https://pandoc.org

2 Likes
7

I know this is not quite what you’re asking for, and maybe you already know, but…

You can annotate Word documents in Word for iPad. Then you don’t need to convert the documents, maybe?

I have more or less the same problem. I annotate in Word and want to convert to pdf after so my students don’t get mixed up annotations if they’re on another version of Word than me. (I’m now going to try out Lars’s LibraOffice-solution!)