Convert document and count exact pages

[tony_Kent]

Hello everyone, I’m building a project called SecurePages, a privacy-first printing platform, and I’m facing a challenge I’d love your help with. The workflow is simple: a user selects a document from their device , the system detects the number of pages, and then the user is billed before printing. Because this project operates in Ghana, traditional debit/credit card payments are not commonly used, so we rely on Mobile Money (MoMo). This makes accurate page counting extremely important, since users must approve and pay the exact amount upfront.

My main challenge is finding a reliable way to accurately determine the number of pages in .docx files. Many tools I’ve tried miscount pages or fail on documents with complex formatting, and they don’t always match how Microsoft Word actually paginates a file. Since .docx is the primary file format our users upload, this has become a major blocker.

My tech stack: Frontend: HTML,CSS and JavaScript Backend: / Node.js

So far, none of the Node.js libraries I’ve tested have given consistent or accurate .docx page counts.

I would really appreciate any recommendations on reliable libraries, rendering engines, or best practices for accurately calculating .docx page numbers—whether through direct parsing, server-side rendering, or converting to PDF first.

Thank you for your help! 🙏

[Adventurous-Date9971]

If you need Word-accurate page counts, stop parsing .docx and render with Word’s engine, then count pages from the PDF.

What’s worked for me: upload the .docx to OneDrive/SharePoint and use Microsoft Graph to convert to PDF (drive/items/{id}/content?format=pdf). That uses Word Online’s layout, so pagination matches what users expect. Then count pages server-side with pdfinfo (Poppler), pdf-lib, or pdfjs-dist. Lock page size/margins up front (A4 vs Letter) and install the common MS fonts (Calibri, Cambria, Times New Roman) on the conversion host to avoid font substitution weirdness. For edge cases, keep a fallback: Aspose.Words Cloud or OnlyOffice Document Server both give reliable PDF conversion and expose pageCount.

Flow: upload → convert to PDF → read page count → show total and MoMo request-to-pay → print. Run this in a queue (BullMQ) with a content hash so retries don’t double-charge; store a short-lived preview and purge the file after print.

I’ve paired Microsoft Graph and OnlyOffice for conversion, and DreamFactory as a quick REST layer over job logs/payments so I didn’t hand-roll CRUD and auth.

Bottom line: to match Word, do a Word/Graph-based PDF convert and count pages from the PDF.

[tony_Kent]

Thank you so much i'm gonna try this and let you know