Hey r-stats people Anyone have ideas on writing code that takes a word doc, renames it in a certain format, and save it as a PDF? Signed, A desperate and tired PhD candidate who need an efficient method for doing this - ThreadSky

cdelawalla.bsky.social • 2 days ago

Hey r-stats people

Anyone have ideas on writing code that takes a word doc, renames it in a certain format, and save it as a PDF?

Signed,
A desperate and tired PhD candidate who need an efficient method for doing this

Comments

tjmahr.com•2 days ago

this is a wrapper over pandoc which i think would do word->latex pdf conversion https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/docs/reference/pandoc_convert.html

tjmahr.com•2 days ago

this might work more natively https://stackoverflow.com/a/53794914

shinyblackshoe.bsky.social•2 days ago

Yes - I hadn't realised it could take docx as an input format. So I think if you have a folder with docx files in you can generate the required using code like this:

shinyblackshoe.bsky.social•2 days ago

folder <- "word_docs"
files <- list.files(folder, pattern = ".docx")

for (file in files) {

rmarkdown::pandoc_convert(file.path(folder,file), to = "pdf")

}

shinyblackshoe.bsky.social•2 days ago

Should (untested) give a pdf for each document. We aren't told how the pdf is to be named... but we can of course define that

gdbassett.bsky.social•2 days ago

Could a hook to pandoc work? Knowing knitr uses pandoc for markdown to PDF hopefully it's already integrated.

kmr.me•2 days ago

I'd normally reach for bash and pandoc for something like that, but if you're on Windows it looks like that's quite doable with PowerShell, a good example here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16537996

doctorzen.net•2 days ago

Just in case r comes up blank, I’m ~95% confident this is doable in Python.

shinyblackshoe.bsky.social•2 days ago

Talk us through this a bit more.

Some_file.docx

Result_file_20250402.pdf

Have you done anything to the file other than effectively done a File Save As?

What operating system?

Does it have word on it?

Why R?

shinyblackshoe.bsky.social•2 days ago

Or are you actually wanting to create the docx file from R in which case can be done with a variety of markdown/quarto options

shinyblackshoe.bsky.social•2 days ago

Are you needing help with file naming?

What is the input file name - is it constant or might there be multiple files etc.

shinyblackshoe.bsky.social•2 days ago

What do you define as "efficient"

e.g. "I have 1000 docx files, I need 1000 pdf files. It can take 3 hours but I don't want to be stood over it"

or "I need to convert 1 docx file in less the 2 seconds"

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