Apex: From Word Document get content and save as PDF

Question

According to Salesforce limits, generating PDF using special characters is impossible to show bold characters. I still have the issue described here, where from a rich text i want to show the field's value using the formatting (bold, etc). Since this is impossible using PDF, i was thinking of workarounds.

• As i saw, printing the rich text area field as a word document (using Visualforce) seems to show properly the greek characters in bold.
• Now, my next step is to somehow get the content of this word document and save it as PDF File.

Is this considered as a correct approach? Does anyone have any ideas on how i could handle my issue? What i tried to do was to get the content of the word document using the "getContent" or "getContentAsPDF" functions and then save a file as PDF. But opening the PDF fails, meaning that it is invalid.

Answer 1

There's no way to escape the limitations of the system PDF renderer while you are operating on-platform. There's only one PDF renderer, whether you use render_as="pdf" or getContentAsPDF(), so you're always going to hit the same limitation.

Your best options are likely:

1. Render some format other than PDF via your Visualforce page, and rely on the user to convert it to PDF. (Note: changing the MIME type does not convert the file to Word; most Visualforce pages that claim to generate Word docs are in fact generating HTML).
2. Use a JavaScript-based PDF library on the front end to create your document.
3. Purchase a commercial document generation solution that correctly supports Unicode characters in rendered PDFs.
4. Use Salesforce Functions to render the document using JavaScript libraries off-platform.