Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
extracting info from pdf
daddydave:
Oh, and the reason why I chose Able2Extract over Nuance at the time - pre-test, as it happened - was because Nuance directed me to their UK shop, where they translate $US into £UK one-to-one. I might have missed a slightly better program, but they missed my business through greed and taking UK residents for fools.
-rjbull (September 14, 2010, 02:52 PM)
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Ah...got it. Yes, I did wonder about that, thanks for clarifying.
rjbull:
is there a free PDF editor/converter that works well? many converters fail to convert properly to doc, even Acrobat
if not, any paid one that is really good?
-kalos (September 14, 2010, 10:43 AM)
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Like others, I doubt you will find a free tool to do what you want, especially with tables. I've used XPDF for extracting text from PDFs. It will also extract images and (I think) do a few other things. You might try the free online file conversion service Zamzar, which I found quite good when I tried it. There's at least one more similar service, Media-Convert.
daddydave:
I should add I have experiemented with freeware tools to convert PDFs to HTML (a potential intermediate format for Word), but the results were abysmal so I don't really recommend that.
Perry Mowbray:
I have, at times, used OCR Terminal home page: Online OCR extensively, and like most (I think probably all) other software the results can be a little flaky and definitely need editing before using.
One job I was using for was converting data printouts into Excel spreadsheets (which had to go via word), and apart from mixing some of the combined cells up, it did pretty well. Still needed an edit as the original document was not perfect quality and in a small font size... but it saved quite a bit of time in the end.
StuR:
kalos,
I've had very good luck a number of times with http://www.pdftoword.com/default.aspx . Upload your pdf to their site, they convert it and return by email. Occasionally within a few minutes, always within 24 hours. And free!
Just two days ago at work I had them convert a 9-pg pdf with tables, highlighting, and a screenshot: the .doc version they returned was perfect.
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