Dmitri Popov at Linux.com - Turning OpenOffice.org into a document conversion tool:

"JODConverter can help you to unleash OpenOffice.org's file conversion capabilities.

To be able to use OpenOffice.org as a conversion engine, you have to start it as a service. This means launching it without its GUI and making it listen for incoming connections on a particular port. To do this, launch OpenOffice.org using the following command on Linux:

soffice -headless -accept="socket,port=8100;urp;"