I've finally encountered a problem, where I didn't already find the answer here or anywhere else on the web:

My program grabs some measurement values from an instrument (I cannot directly control it so I have to wait until the measurement was done by the user and parse the report), calculates some derived values and shall put these values back into the pdf report, which was automatically generated by the instrument control software.

It all works until I come to the line where the printout is started. It always opens the word print dialog instead of silently overwriting my file. I actually don't understand what I am doing wrong when calling PrintOut.

Here is the example code:

Imports Microsoft.Office.Interop
Module Example
Private Sub PrintReport()
    Dim intAnswer As Integer
    Dim strReportFileName As String = ""
    Dim appWord As New Word.Application
    Dim wdDoc As Word.Document
    dim strPPF as string = "0.5" 'For testing, normally a parameter
    dim strFolder as string = "C:\UVVis-Data" 'For testing, normally a parameter

'Find and open the PDF file of the report:
    strReportFileName = (From fi As IO.FileInfo In (New IO.DirectoryInfo(strFolder.GetFiles("*.pdf")) Order By fi.LastWriteTime Descending Select fi)(0).FullName 'It will be always the newest file in that folder
    appWord.Visible = False 'hide word from the user
    wdDoc = appWord.Documents.Open(strReportFileName) 'open the PDF report
'Replace the placeholders which were defined in the report template earlier:
    With appWord.Selection.Find
        .Text = "#PPF#"
        .Replacement.ClearFormatting()
        .Replacement.Text = strPPF
        .Execute(Replace:=Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdReplace.wdReplaceAll)
    End With

'Print out the modified report:
    'wdDoc.PrintOut(False, False,, strReportFileName,,,,,,, True) 'this was my first approach
    wdDoc.PrintOut(Background:=False, Append:=False, OutputFileName:=strReportFileName, PrintToFile:=True) 'this also doesn't work as intended

'Close the file and restore word to it's normal state:
    wdDoc.Close(Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdSaveOptions.wdDoNotSaveChanges)
    appWord.Visible = True 
    appWord.Quit()
End Sub
end Module

CodePudding user response：

Use the Document.ExportAsFixedFormat method which saves a document as PDF or XPS format.

Public Sub ExportAsFixedFormat_Example()  
 wdDoc.ExportAsFixedFormat pbFixedFormatTypePDF, "pathandfilename.pdf"  
End Sub

CodePudding user response：

Thank you for the input. I found a second problem with my code: I cannot overwrite the original document once it is open in word.

I solved this by first moving the pdf to a temporary folder, opening that temporary file in word and deleting it after word is closed.