Editing User:Ckeene/Ideas for future versions of eprints (section)

== Things that have made it in to Eprints 3.1 ==
=== Auto covert MS Word to PDF ===
[April 08n update: this looks like it is a plugin in 3.1, excellent]

The ability to let users upload a Word file and eprints to turn it in to a PDF (and store both) would make help many users and make the system more attractive to use.

Telephone call..

Humanities academic: "err hi, I've hear you're the people to contact to put my research online, how do I go about it?"

eprints admin: "cool, you just need to find you final draft of your article, covert it to PDF, using any PDF tool such as Acrobat or PDFcreator, which you may need to install, if you have admin rights on your PC, and then...." [sounds of despair from other end of phone, caller hangs up]

Of course, academics hardly ever phone up with such enthusiasm, but this talk of complicated stuff doesn't make it easy. If there's some sort of *nix library/tool out there which eprints could use to convert on the fly MS Word files to PDF, then this would make it so much easier from the researcher's point of view.
They just need to upload their Word file, and it's made available as a PDF to users.