PDF to Doc converters.

ShiverinEskimo

Anyone using a decent PDF converter that will allow you to open it in Word in order to copy and paste text and pics for Educational Purposes?

Bri

Honestly I dunno but maybe openoffice.org can do it - it seems to do everything else and it's free. Havn't used it much but first impressions are good and it's always suggested here.

Also, in an entirely seperate topic, there is a program called Advance PDF Password Recovery incase you lost the password preventing you from editing your own PDFs. Obviously using it in another way would probably be frowned upon.

RicardoSmith

Its called Adobe Acrobat. It installs a plugin into word so you can do exactly that, assuming the PDF allows you to author it. Because you can set the PDF so it can't be edited. You often find other third party apps on cover CD's to do much the same think. I don't have the name of one handy at the moment.

axer

if the pdf is locked so that you cannot edit it you can get software to unlock it. let me know if you need examples of software.

pickarooney

I may be wrong, but even with a locked document you can just highlight the entire text and File, Save As... .doc with Adobe Acrobat (the full program).

RicardoSmith

pickarooney wrote:

I may be wrong, but even with a locked document you can just highlight the entire text and File, Save As... .doc with Adobe Acrobat (the full program).

You can't. If you could what would be the point of locking it?

Word security is rubbish, but PDF is ok.

Capt'n Midnight

PDFcreator & Adobe can use up to 128 bit encryption and one of the options is to block the copying of images & text.

You can use pdfcreator to generate a pdf document. Then open it in Acrobat reader and use the "print as image" option to remove all traces of text in the doc when you send it through pdfcreator a second time. So it's resonably easy make documents difficult to open even if you do get through the password, you could also use pdfcreator to generate multipage tiff's and then convert them to pdf's or better still use a lossy image file format like jpeg and drop the quality down before the second pass.

pickarooney

RicardoSmith wrote:

You can't. If you could what would be the point of locking it?

Word security is rubbish, but PDF is ok.

So it can't be edited? Even if you take a screenshot of an open PDF you can open it in word via an OCR plugin, so it's not exactly secure.
I'm probably wrong, but I don't think there's anything secure about PDFs.

Victor

Search for the document in google and open it as html. You woudln't be breaking copyright now would you, when you say "for Educational Purposes"?

pickarooney wrote:

I'm probably wrong, but I don't think there's anything secure about PDFs.

I'm not sure if the intention is quite to be "secure" - the intention is consistant presentation.

RicardoSmith

pickarooney wrote:

So it can't be edited? Even if you take a screenshot of an open PDF you can open it in word via an OCR plugin, so it's not exactly secure.
I'm probably wrong, but I don't think there's anything secure about PDFs.

Be a right pain to do that. But the point is you can't edit that PDF as you want. If you really want to copy/counterfeit it you can. But you'd have to do a lot of work on it. Same with nearly anything really. Most people won't be able, or be bothered to do that. Thats secure enough for most applications. Short of poking your eyes out with stick.... :eek:

Keyzer

ShiverinEskimo wrote:

Anyone using a decent PDF converter that will allow you to open it in Word in order to copy and paste text and pics for Educational Purposes?

A workaround is to save it as text (option in the file menu), and then copy it into a word doc. Only drawback is that no pics will transfer.