Anyone know of a good PDF to Word converter? I've tried a couple online, but they fail to actually produce an editable Word doc. Thanks for any assistance.
> Anyone know of a good PDF to Word converter?
Adobe Acrobat. Sure, it's $300. So what. Fork it over. It's worth it.
Having it has changed the way I document my projects from proposal to deliverable. I will not be without it again.
I also have Nuance's PDF Convertor which is something in the way of an Acrobat clone, but it just isn't the same.
You can also try the on-line convertor at http://www.zamzar.com .
I agree with Norman, but if you want free...
http://www.onlineocr.net/
Bought a small printer a few months back and part of the software on the installation CD happened to be a .pdf to text converter which worked fairly well with no mis-spellings I was able to see.
Something that was fun was getting a check from registered that was drawn on Chase Bank.
They apparently have a check reader that can decipher hand written cursive and prompt the teller to dispense the cash. The fun part was handing back a $192 overpayment to the teller. Seems like one of the managers waived the $6 check cashing fee, for me, for the next month or so.
Acrobat is worth every penny, spend the money and reap the rewards.
> Acrobat is worth every penny, spend the money and reap the rewards.
I second the idea that Acrobat is worth what it costs (and then some).
Having said that, most of the time you are better off to not try to convert from PDF to Word.
If your pdf contains mostly text your best bet is to:
1. select the text
2. copy the text to the clipboard
3. paste special in Word (use the plain text option most of the time to avoid bringing in squirrelly formatting.)
Larry P
> 1. select the text
> 2. copy the text to the clipboard
That will work if the document was printed to pdf in the first place. If it is a scan of a paper copy your method will not work.
There are lots of decent free programs on download.com
I use free OCR. It doesn't keep formatting, but gets you the text, with a few mistakes.
It saves a lot of time vs retyping everything.
> > 1. select the text
> > 2. copy the text to the clipboard
> That will work if the document was printed to pdf in the first place. If it is a scan of a paper copy your method will not work.
What you say is true. What is also true is that if the pdf is an image then the Word converters will not work either.
If what you have is an image of text you can do an OCR routine to create some text from the image. At that point, you are better off to copy and paste than you are to try to create a Word document using some sort of converter.
Have been there and done that. Every time I tried to convert the program ended up making all sorts of weird text boxes that were not connected.
I stand by my earlier advice, copy and paste special are better than most converters.
Larry P
I downloaded a free program called "PDFZilla" that does pretty good wth some formats of documents. Here is the link.
