On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 1:15 PM, Ralph Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > does anyone have experience with a PDF to Word converter that > does a consistently good job bringing PDFs into Word maintaining > formatting?
This is a hard problem. Short answer is you won't find anything that does a good job. PDFs are essentially electronic paper[1]. Just like you can't easily turn a printed paper document back into a Word file, you can't easily turn a PDF into a Word file. Even in the best cases, you usually just get the raw text. Sometimes the text is all jumbled up. Some PDFs are raster images, which means they don't even have anything the computer will recognize as text. (Scanned documents, for example.) You have to run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software on the PDF to even get any text, and OCR is an imperfect process. This is a request people keep bring to me. I've tried countless "but I saw this program on a website that said it would do it" demos, and none of them have come close to doing a good job. [1] Well, that was the original idea. In their quest to come up with excuses for people to upgrade to the latest release of Acrobat, Adobe has perverted the idea quite a bit. But the core design remains. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
