"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." That was mostly my experience also, but then I thought of posting to this list. I just uploaded a 17 page PDF document to www.zamzar.com, <http://www.zamzar.com,/> and got back the converted Word document in about 15 minutes. Comparing the two files side by side, the Word document is almost identical. Fonts, font sizes, font colors, underlining, bold - all the same. Bulleted lists are good, and the box around the title page was transferred as well. The only thing it seems to have missed is a line across the top of the page footer above the date and 'page x of y' information. Not bad for a freebie! "Some PDFs are raster images, which means they don't even have anything the computer will recognize as text. (Scanned documents, for example.)" Yup - not going to work for that, all you'll get back is a Word document where each page is just an image of the corresponding PDF page. One of the blurbs on the PDF Converter site seem to imply that it will OCR a scanned PDF and then create the Word document - don't know how well that actually works. As stated, OCR is not totally reliable. PDF Converter from nuance.com looks like it could be a good option; we may try out as it has a lot more features. Everyone, thanks for your suggestions. If zamzar handles another 50 page document HR needs for the lawyers, then this took care of my immediate need for today. Ralph -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, June 03, 2009 3:08 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Kind of OT: PDF to Word converters 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/> ~ Confidentiality Notice: ---------------------------------- This communication, including any attachments, may contain confidential information and is intended only for the individual or entity to whom it is addressed. Any review, dissemination, or copying of this communication by anyone other than the intended recipient is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email, delete and destroy all copies of the original message. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
