Convert Microsoft Word XML To PDF Without Using Microsoft Word

Hi all,

I work for a financial company where we send out lots of correspondence to clients on a daily and monthly basis. This would typically be something like a financial report, account statements, etc. We've decided to use PDF as the format which these documents must be in when our clients receive them.

Our marketing and sales departments designs the templates of these documents using Microsoft Word. They can save these MS Word documents in the Word XML format (either 2003 or 2007). We want it in XML format, because it is text based, and we can therefore string replace the content to update the template with a client€™s information. In the same token RTF would also do, but the file size when converted to RTF is a problem.

What I am looking for is a way to convert this XML into PDF using something like XSL-FO - i.e. we do not want to use the Word Interopt on our Production Server, firstly it is a little slow and secondly the production server is unmanned and we cannot allow a WinWord.EXE process to not close successfully for some or other reason.

I've tried a number of companies' evaluation software to try and achieve this (converting the WordML to PDF via XSL-FO), but so far no luck.

Does anybody know of a stylesheet out there with which I will be able to achieve this? Or an alternative method of converting MS Word files into PDF without using Word to do it?

Thank you in advance.

Regards