Hey there, let's tackle your PDF-to-DOCX conversion problem. I notice you're using LibreOffice's lowriter via subprocess, but running into exceptions. Let's go through potential fixes for your current approach, plus a simpler pure-Python alternative that might save you headaches.

Issues with Your Current Code #

Your code has a few common pitfalls that could be causing the errors:

• Path escaping & shell risks: Using shell=True with formatted strings can break if your file paths have spaces or special characters. It also introduces security risks if the folder contains untrusted filenames.
• Lack of error handling: You aren't catching exceptions or checking the exit code of the lowriter process, so you can't see exactly why it's failing (e.g., lowriter not found, corrupted PDF, permission issues).
• Incomplete conversion command: You didn't specify an output directory, which might lead to files being saved in unexpected places.

Fixed Version of Your LibreOffice Approach #

Here's a revised version of your code that addresses these issues:

import os
import subprocess
from subprocess import CalledProcessError

pdf_folder = '/my/pdf/folder'

for top, dirs, files in os.walk(pdf_folder):
    for filename in files:
        # Match case-insensitively for PDFs
        if filename.lower().endswith('.pdf'):
            abspath = os.path.join(top, filename)
            output_dir = os.path.dirname(abspath)
            
            try:
                # Use a list of arguments instead of shell=True to avoid escaping issues
                subprocess.check_call([
                    'lowriter',
                    '--invisible',
                    '--convert-to', 'docx',
                    abspath,
                    '--outdir', output_dir
                ])
                print(f"✅ Successfully converted: {abspath}")
            except CalledProcessError as e:
                print(f"❌ Failed to convert {abspath}: Process returned error code {e.returncode}")
            except FileNotFoundError:
                print("❌ Error: 'lowriter' not found. Ensure LibreOffice is installed and added to your system PATH.")

Key improvements here:

• Uses a list of arguments instead of shell=True to handle spaces/special characters safely.
• Adds error handling to catch common issues like missing lowriter or failed conversions.
• Explicitly sets the output directory to match the original PDF's location.

Alternative: Pure-Python Conversion with pdf2docx #

If you don't want to rely on LibreOffice, the pdf2docx library is a great pure-Python alternative. It handles most standard PDFs well and integrates seamlessly into your Python script.

Step 1: Install the library #

pip install pdf2docx

Step 2: Conversion Code #

import os
from pdf2docx import Converter

pdf_folder = '/my/pdf/folder'

for top, dirs, files in os.walk(pdf_folder):
    for filename in files:
        if filename.lower().endswith('.pdf'):
            abspath = os.path.join(top, filename)
            output_path = os.path.splitext(abspath)[0] + '.docx'
            
            try:
                # Initialize converter and run conversion
                converter = Converter(abspath)
                converter.convert(output_path, start=0, end=None)  # Convert all pages
                converter.close()
                print(f"✅ Converted: {abspath} → {output_path}")
            except Exception as e:
                print(f"❌ Error converting {abspath}: {str(e)}")

Pros & Cons of pdf2docx #

• Pros: No external dependencies, easy to install, full control within Python, works cross-platform.
• Cons: May struggle with highly complex PDFs (e.g., multi-column layouts, embedded charts, scanned text—note: scanned PDFs are images, so you'd need OCR first).

Give these approaches a try, and you should be able to resolve your conversion issues. If you still hit specific errors, sharing the exact exception message would help narrow things down further!

内容的提问来源于stack exchange，提问作者Also