i think it passed the preliminary tests, so i'm going to upload the files and i'll come back if i find any problems.

the conversion seems to be working.

i'll have to go over it to see how well.

so, now that i have what looks like a stable conversion method, i can get to actually finishing the parsing for the end of 2013.

it's not entirely clear that this will work, but let's hope it does.

expect combined files for the last semester of 2013 to come up fairly shortly, once i'm sure they're all neatly formatted, locally.

well...

that seems to work.

i want to be clear: i tried uploading doc files to google drive and then downloading them as pdfs and the formatting often broke on them. the same thing happened at several of the free conversion sites, including at the adobe site. so, i mean, i tried this, and it didn't work.

the smallpdf.com site was particularly accurate for whatever reason, it worked when none of the other sites did, but it has those file size restrictions. and, i mean, i don't know where i'm sending my files to and from, here. 

will the microsoft converters be on par with the smallpdf ones? well, i can hope so, but we'll have to find out. and, there will be files coming to test with soon enough, too.

if this doesn't work out, i can always try openoffice. but, i think i'm happy with this as an answer, so long as it's actually effective.

i don't know why i didn't think of this earlier. well, i guess that microsoft didn't come up in the google search, funny that....

google: fix your word--->pdf conversion. it doesn't work.

wait.

microsoft has a cloud, too.

can i use it to convert files? that would be easy.

and, why don't i use google docs?

it doesn't format right.

and, my experience has been that it's slow and tends to crash because it's autosaving far too often.

it's fine for smaller documents that don't have a lot of detail, but i need to be able to create documents that are hundreds of pages long and i need to be able to format them in very specific ways. 

plus, there's data sanctity issues regarding access by law enforcement.

it's not an application that is properly delegated to a cloud-computing platform; this is something that should primarily be created and stored locally. it's just not the right tool for this job...

abiword is no longer being offered for windows from the developer (and you shouldn't download things from sketchy sites like softronic, pretty much ever), which is what i need it for, and it appears to rely on a pdf printer, anyways.

it was a nice, small file, though. no doubt a minimal install process; maybe even a standalone. these are the kinds of programs i insist on, nowadays. i don't need a word processor building a tower in my registry....

maybe i can find another clone. it's worth a shot before i resort to downloading oo.

if i'm going to download a large package and install it in a virtual machine just to get the functionality to convert from .doc to .pdf, i should be going with openoffice.

again: the way i've been doing this for years is to print it, and it worked just fine, except that the links lose their functionality (it's just like you're printing it to a piece of paper, but virtually, and you can't click the links on your paper, not until we get specific types of three-dimensional printing, so you can't click the links in the virtually printed pdf), and that is absolutely fundamental to what i'm doing - the end product needs to be interactive.

maybe i can get a very minimal version of openoffice..

this should be easier than this.

in fact, i remember seeing react os style freeware word 2003 clones, and you'd think they'd do it, so maybe i should look that up first. abi something..?

i don't want to upgrade the office software, either. the program does this natively after 2010, but i went through great lengths to strip office 2003 down to a 20 mb package. i really, really, really don't want any of this recent office software on my system. at all.

one way out would be to install 2010 in the virtual machine, and just open it up to convert, but that's kind of crazy.

why is this so unnecessarily difficult? why can't i find a plugin for word 2003?

yeah, it has built in print functionality, but i can already do that pretty easily.

can i find a printer driver that prints links?

installing latex would also be overkill. to an extent, i'd be happy to just upload the file in word and let you deal with it, but noise trade won't even take files in that format, and the pdf format is non-proprietary.

i just like word. i'm using word 2003, and it's a just very clean, uncluttered processor - minimal. kind of not very microsoft, but maybe the best word processor ever created, nonetheless.

there's nothing stopping me from continuing what i'm doing, besides file sizes and the awkwardness of it. like i say, this shouldn't be so hard.....really...

i don't want to download a cracked version of adobe studio. that seems like overkill. even if it's 15 years old, and it would be...

i'm actually a foxit user and have been for as long as i can remember. mid 00s, probably. i had an older machine and had to make an effort to fight the bloatware, and that was one of the steps i took, moving from adobe to foxit. you kids don't even know what bloatware is...

the newer freeware versions of foxit actually claim to be able to do this natively.

let's give it a try in the virtual machine, first...

i am awake, for the first time in, like, a week. hooray!

the smoke's better just right this second. somebody find me a hollowed out log to bash my head against.

there was some autocapitalization from facebook (fuckers.) that i had to fix, and that's been replaced, so i'm ready to get back to it, now.

and, i'm hoping that i don't move from in front of these two machines until i get 2013 finished, once and for all.

the plan is to do all of the office work on the windows machine and then upload it to noise trade and bandcamp via the chromebook. this is temporary, because i don't want to deal with broken windows boxes right now. something else i'm remembering about this chromebook is that i have to log in to turn the ad block on, which means typing out a 100 character pass phrase....

first, i need an answer to the pdf problem. surely it's not that hard. surely the right software is out there. i must go forth and look...