Someone asked me today why they couldn't write on the DOCX document they received from a student using the pen in their Onyx Note Pro reader. The answer, of course, is that while the Onyx can read those files, it can't annotate them: that only works with PDFs.
Next question then, is of course: do I really need to open each file separately and save them as PDF? That's going to take forever, I have 30 students per class!
Fear not, shell scripting and headless mode flies in to the rescue!
As it turns out, one of the Libreoffice parameters allow you to run batch operations on files. By calling:
libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf *.docx
LibreOffice will happily convert all the *.docx files in the current
directory to PDF. But because navigating the commandline can be hard,
I figured I could push this a tiny little bit further and wrote the
following script:
#!/bin/sh
exec libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf "$@"Drop this in ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/libreoffice-pdf, mark
it executable, and voilà! You can batch-convert basically any text
file (or anything supported by LibreOffice, really) into PDF.
Now I wonder if this would be a useful addition to the Debian package, anyone?