creating pdf from script

Dear Lori,
 
as an editor of a veterinary scientific journal I receive a lot of MS-Word documents that need to be forwarded to others. For several reasons (controlling the file size, protection from changes of content,...) I prefer to advance them as PDF-files. Currently I am converting each document manually. It would be of great help, if there was a way to automate this process. Is there a feature in Acrobat, that can be called from a web based php-script? The aim would be to automatically convert MS-Word files that are uploaded from the internet to a web server and forward them via email as PDF-files.
If that cannot be achieved with Adobe Acrobat, maybe you can recommend another software or a tutorial site.
 
With kind regards,
Tibor Ferencz
from Berlin, Germany