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I am trying to convert a .docx received by mail to a correct pdf by using pandoc (I am using GNU/Linux).

I have an error concerning characters encoding :

$ pandoc file.docx -o file.pdf
pandoc: Cannot decode byte '\x87': Data.Text.Encoding.decodeUtf8: Invalid UTF-8 stream

I tried to identify the encoding :

$ file -i file .docx 
file.docx: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; charset=binary

I am a little surprised by charset=binary (I was expecting charset=iso8859-15). However I tried to convert the .docx to utf8 anyway and it is not working :

 $ iconv -t utf-8 file.docx
P!      $iconv: séquence d'échappement non permise à la position 16

I have the same error with the command line from pandoc documentation : 

iconv -t utf-8 file.docx | pandoc | iconv -f utf-8

How can I convert this .docx to pdf with pandoc?

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  • Why don't you use Zamzar - for a one off... I have to use Kingsoft to edit my work, though it is probably illegal to use in North America...
    – Wilf
    Dec 17, 2013 at 16:54
  • I suggest providing iconv a source character set, using the -f flag. For example, iconv -f ISO-8859-15 -t utf-8 file.docx might work. No idea what the format of a .docx file is, though.
    – derobert
    Dec 17, 2013 at 17:00
  • @wilf I tried. The output is not correct (normally, Zamzar does his job very well but not for this file).
    – ppr
    Dec 17, 2013 at 17:01
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    @wilf thanks (pandoc is so powerful sometimes I forget it has limitations).
    – ppr
    Dec 17, 2013 at 17:07
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    @derobert: Running iconv directly on a .docx file is unlikely to work. iconv assumes that its input is a text file in some specified or inferred format. A .docx file is actually a zip file (a compressed archive) containing (mostly) xml files. You might conceivably have some luck unzipping the .docx file, running iconv on the constituent files, and then re-zipping everything back into a new .docx, but I wouldn't bet on it working. For one thing, the xml file containing the actual content of the document specifies its encoding: encoding="UTF-8", for example.
    – Keith Thompson
    Dec 17, 2013 at 20:55

2 Answers 2

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In the documentation here, .docx is not listed as a compatible input:

Pandoc is a Haskell library for converting from one markup format to another, and a command-line tool that uses this library. It can read markdown and (subsets of) Textile, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, MediaWiki markup, Haddock markup, OPML, and DocBook; and it can write plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, XHTML, HTML 5, LaTeX (including beamer slide shows), ConTeXt, RTF, OPML, DocBook, OpenDocument, ODT, Word docx, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, EPUB (v2 or v3), FictionBook2, Textile, groff man pages, Emacs Org-Mode, AsciiDoc, and Slidy, Slideous, DZSlides, reveal.js or S5 HTML slide shows. It can also produce PDF output on systems where LaTeX is installed.

Try something else, like Libreoffice - which can do docx, aslong as you don't mind a few formatting errors.

EDIT:

The description now says that Pandoc now seems to support reading from Word DOCX (as well as DocBook and a few other formats):

Pandoc is a Haskell library for converting from one markup format to another, and a command-line tool that uses this library. It can read markdown and (subsets of) Textile, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, MediaWiki markup, TWiki markup, Haddock markup, OPML, Emacs Org-mode, DocBook, txt2tags, EPUB and Word docx; and it can write plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, XHTML, HTML 5, LaTeX (including beamer slide shows), ConTeXt, RTF, OPML, DocBook, OpenDocument, ODT, Word docx, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, DokuWiki markup, Haddock markup, EPUB (v2 or v3), FictionBook2, Textile, groff man pages, Emacs Org-Mode, AsciiDoc, InDesign ICML, and Slidy, Slideous, DZSlides, reveal.js or S5 HTML slide shows. It can also produce PDF output on systems where LaTeX is installed.

As @evilsoup suggested, this might work:

cd /DIRECTORY/WITH/FILE/IN && libreoffice --headless --convert-to html 'FILE.docx' && pandoc 'FILE.html' -o 'FILE.pdf'

Yes, you can use the libreoffice command with --outdir, but the html output does not always work that way...

I gave this a quick test, and it seemed to work, apart from Pandoc crashing due to a gif image in the document smiley

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  • Um.... Word docx is right there in your quoted text (right after OpenDocument and ODT). That said, docx is still not a well documented format and so, actual compatibility in the open world is.... spotty, shall we say, and your suggestion for LibreOffice (along with the formatting differences ) is good.
    – SuperMagic
    Dec 17, 2013 at 19:27
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    If you really want a pandoc-style (actually LaTeX-made) PDF, you can also use LibreOffice to convert the docx to html, and then use that as input for pandoc (depending on the competence of the person who made the original document, you may need to remove a bunch of <BR>s from the html).
    – evilsoup
    Dec 17, 2013 at 22:47
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    one can use direct libreoffice pdf export: libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf inputfile.docx
    – andrej
    May 22, 2014 at 7:52
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    On OSX, the executable is called soffice and can be found in /Applications/LibreOffice.app/contents/MacOS/bin. Further details can be found here: ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/12084/…
    – Tim Saylor
    Jan 21, 2015 at 17:41
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    Pandoc now lists Word docx as a supported format in the documentation.
    – cledoux
    Apr 13, 2015 at 14:43
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This still comes up on google searches so I wanted to put this on the record: pandoc could not read docx when this question was asked (the error comes from trying to read a binary file) but since version 1.13 it can, and it does a pretty good job of it.

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