Hello all. Sorry for the cross-post. I posted in the "Java Programming
Language" group thinking I was in this group,
"comp.lang.java.programmer" ...

I have seen gazillions of messages about this subject, and have
followed loads of links from Google to home pages for products that do
just this -- for a price.

Is there no way to do this *free*? Currently we are using a combination
of iText and JasperReports to generate PDFs but we also have a case
where we have a whole bunch of already-generated Microsoft Word docs.
What I would like to be able to do is emulate the Windows "Print to
PDF" from my webapp -- create a PDF doc for every Word doc that is
exactly the same, then save them as BLOBs in the DB.

The problems are 1) it has to work on a Linux box and 2) I would like
to be able to do it for x documents all at once. So obviously, loading
the Word doc, printing to a PDF file and uploading that file to the DB
isn't gonna fly if the user has to do it 200 times.

Anyone ever did this without having to buy one of those gigantic and
expensive professional reporting tools?

Thanks in advance,
syg