LibreOffice Portable

JODConverter should be compatible with LibreOffice Portable. All the documentation has been taken from here.

Some important notes on how to use LibreOffice Portable with JODConverter:

1. The main problem occurring is that your LibreOffice settings contain machine/OS specific settings. Therefore it is usually the case that if you distribute LibreOffice Portable with your software together with your preferred settings, that the settings work on one machine, but cause LibreOffice to crash on another machine. To solve this problem, use the safe mode of LibreOffice to factory reset the settings, then close it and make a copy of the settings. Then restart LibreOffice normally with the GUI, select your preferred settings, then close LibreOffice again. The settings will end up in registrymodifications.xcu. Unfortunately, LibreOffice adds a lot of extra settings to the rest of the settings in the folder, therefore you just copy the registrymodifications.xcu to your factory resetted settings copy you made before changing the settings. The registrymodifications.xcu will contain some extra settings you did not select (as a good dev, you might want to clean them out until they are only the ones you selected explicitly for better maintenance). However, the extra settings are not machine dependent and thus cause no crash. Use the one folder of settings per LibreOffice instance mechanism (template profile setting) of JODConverter so that none of your task processing LibreOffice instances will ever mess with your fragile settings.

2. LibreOffice Portable can be used like an installed LibreOffice. Just set the LibreOffice home of JODConverter to LibreofficePortable/App/libreoffice to make it use the soffice.exe and such, it is not required to make JODConverter use the LibreofficePortable*.exe. The latter will even cause cleanup-problems, because JODConverter terminates the binary but LibreOffice Portable does not clean up properly.

3. It is important that you do not have a LibreOffice installed on your machine aside from the LibreOffice Portable you are using. This will make your settings work flawlessly with LibreOffice Portable (everything will work great all the time), but as you transfer to another machine with LibreOffice installed, things will not work anymore. So your developer machine should have no LibreOffice installed, just as your testing computer should not have one installed. This saves you a lot of time debugging spurious problems.

4. If you want to make pipes work using JODConverter, but your system runs on a x64 machine, you need to additionally distribute some libraries from the x64 version of LibreOffice, since there exists no x64 version of LibreOfficePortable. To get the libraries, you install a LibreOffice x64 version on your computer (this might be in conflict with the point 3 above, at least uninstall it again after you are done with this or use another machine than your daily dev machine). Then you get the following dlls from the LibreOffice program folder: jpipe.dll, jpipx.dll, sal3.dll, uwinapi.dll. These dlls will have to be on the Java path in order for your JODConverter to be able to use the pipes. Additionally, you will have to install the Microsoft Visual C++ redistributable 2013 (x64) on the machine (This might change in the future, so if it does not work, you will have to use a dll analyzer program to find out what the dlls are linked to and then look for those names on the web to find out what these dlls belong to. Get the dlls from trustworthy sources. You do not want to distribute a virus with your application.). This is because some of the above dlls are liked against some of the redistributable dlls. I know it is hard and you want to cry, but it will work in the end. But that seems to be the cost of making this stuff fully portable.