Move soffice and pdftoppm pipelines to the wolf command

Two ways to migrate

• Native verbs. Call wolf render, wolf convert, wolf rasterize, and wolf recalc and read the JSON receipt each run produces.
• Shims. The wolf binary run under the names soffice, pdftoppm, pdfinfo, pdftotext, and pdfimages accepts the documented command lines. Anything else fails before it writes a file, and a shim never falls back to a real LibreOffice or Poppler binary.

Command mapping

Every native command requires --outdir. Which input and target pairs run depends on the linked engines, and an unimplemented pair exits 4 and names the pair.

Native commands

wolf render report.docx --to pdf --outdir out
wolf rasterize out/report.pdf --dpi 150 --outdir out
wolf render deck.pptx --to png --pages 1 --scale-to 320 --outdir thumbs
wolf convert legacy.doc --to docx --outdir converted
wolf convert book.xlsx --to csv --outdir converted
# each run writes a JSON receipt; render and convert add a render report

Exit code 0 means every output was written with no error-severity loss. Exit code 1 means outputs exist but the render report names an error-severity omission or approximation. Exit codes 2 to 6 and 70 are failures that write no outputs. Check the code instead of treating any written file as success:

import subprocess

done = subprocess.run(["wolf", "render", "report.docx", "--to", "pdf", "--outdir", "out"])
if done.returncode == 1:
    print("partial output: read out/render-report.json")
elif done.returncode:
    raise SystemExit(f"wolf failed with exit code {done.returncode}")

Keep your command lines with the shims

export PATH="$PWD/wolf-shims:$PATH"   # soffice, pdftoppm, pdfinfo: links to the wolf binary
soffice --headless --convert-to pdf --outdir out report.docx
pdftoppm -png -r 150 out/report.pdf out/report
pdfinfo out/report.pdf

• soffice --convert-to accepts the bare targets pdf, odt, docx, pptx, xlsx, and csv. Options such as --headless, --invisible, and --norestore have no effect. Exit code 1 reports any unsupported argument.
• pdftoppm writes PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and PPM pages and defaults to 150 dpi. Poppler shims exit 99 for an unsupported argument and 1 for an unreadable input.
• A run with omissions still exits 0, as the native tools do, and prints a summary line on standard error for each pdf, docx, pptx, or xlsx output. Set WOLF_REPORT_DIR to a directory to write a receipt and render report for each shim run.

The LibreOffice headless alternative page lists the shim limits and the cases where LibreOffice remains the better fit.

Migration checklist

1. Search the pipeline for every soffice, pdftoppm, pdfinfo, pdftotext, and pdfimages call and mark each against the table.
2. Keep LibreOffice for every call marked unsupported, including other convert targets and macros.
3. Pin fonts. The native commands use bundled fonts plus any --font-dir folders, while the shims default to system fonts and read extra folders from WOLF_FONT_DIRS.
4. Run a representative set of documents through both paths and compare page counts and page images by eye.
5. Expect pagination and line breaks to differ from LibreOffice in some documents, and set a tolerance before the comparison.
6. Handle exit code 1 explicitly and read the render report for losses.
7. Switch one pipeline, keep the old path for rollback, and widen after the output review.

Published rendering results state their corpus and caveats in the Wolf Runtime announcement.

Get the wolf command

The wolf command ships with Wolf Runtime, which is licensed under a written Order. There is no pip package for it. The Wolf Runtime page lists the integration steps: select the build, install the shims or call the command directly, and run your own documents while you check the receipts, omissions, and refusals.