There may be a "Print to tiff" driver and then a "Tiff to doc" OCR program, but that will probably give you lots of errors.
________________________________ From: Ted Roche <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2011 7:59 PM Subject: Re: [NF] "Word" printer driver On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 7:47 PM, Jarvis, Matthew <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> P.S. This has 'bad idea' written all over it, you know... >> > > Hmm - how so? Maybe too brain dead to see the obvious and the 3 days > off I start in about 14 minutes has my mind elsewhere... DOC is a COM-based, object-oriented storage of text, styles, layout, forms, and a million unshown bits of meta-data about a document (previous versions, margins, tabs, etc.) PDF is an _output_ format of processing print instructions from some app, through the Windows printer driver morass of a system, into graphic and font primitives, and finally into Postscript that's rendered as a PDF. It's like compiling source code only more obscure. Hoping to get back the original source is even more unlikely than with decompilers: PDF has it's own concept of layout, page positioning, font metrics, etc. Original Word structures like styles and names, tables of contents and links, and tables are completely missing from the final product. > > Full story: > > We have a 3rd party forms repository that over the years has been loaded > up with all sorts of "mission critical" stuff... our originals were done > in DOC format usually and uploaded to the server, where the server > converts/stores them as PDF. > > This 3rd party system does not allow any SaveAs capability - you can > view it or print a hardcopy - that's all. > > Well due to attrition, neglect, incompetence, disaster what have you the > DOC versions of these things have slowly disappeared over the years. > > >From time to time users call up and beg for an e-version of a file, > where we "print" them using CutePDF to create the file, send it to the > user, they go off and find someone with full blown Adobe Writer > installed to allow them to make their changes. Optical Character Recognition may give you some of it back, but it tends to be good at clean text and lousy at complex structures, like outlines or tables. > And I found out today that CutePDF won't convert all of these perfectly > for some reason (some docs are *really* complex) so was thinking going > straight to Word/DOC format might be the answer... > > The 3rd party is more than happy to give us DOC versions of these files > - at $50 a pop.... OUCH... > > So yes, this is prompting me to come up with a different way of getting > these into DOC formats.. <g> OpenOffice.org 3.x will open PDFs directly. It won't/can't recover the metadata that's not there, but it can save as .DOC. Reluctantly, and under protest, of course. IMNSHO, The most efficient way to convert a bunch of complex PDFs back into word documents is to hire a couple of tech writers. Times is tough, they'll do it cheap and they'll do it right. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/CACW6n4tboyRz=semqogxzxwejqhej+fpqsowzje-bmrexfx...@mail.gmail.com ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious. --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html --- _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
