I was able to finally install tidyp and HTML::Tidy. It turns out the conversion produces a flat text file in PDF format. I lose all the formatting from the original Word document. It appears the only solution is to convert it through OpenOffice or Word which is not something that comes installed by the webhost.

Even if I could install OpenOffice locally, I imagine it would take up more of my alloted space than I can afford.

I was hoping that like most things, there would be several solutions to this problem. It seemed like a very common thing that many people would need to accomplish in a CLI mode.

My next attempt will be to find a way to convert a word document to postscript and then use ps2pdf to convert it to a PDF thereby hoping to maintain the formatting.