PCFormat Forum Archive

Hi there,

Does anyone know of any free software to download that converts PDF files to Word documents and works?
Been trying a few and can't seem to convert my 28MB PDF file.
Any help will be appreciated..

Which ones have you tried so far?

Is the document a proper pdf or is it one created with one of those printer drivers/copy machine? If the latter you'll need something with OCR capability.

Anyway.

Adobe Reader X1 has an option to do conversion online. Dunno what it costs, but if anyone can do the conversion it should be them?

*Edit

Yes, this'll do you
Adobe ExportPDF
US $1.67/month (Billed annually at $19.99/year)

And most importantly:

Make scanned text editable with Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Yeah I can't list all the one's I've tried and failed with (too many!), but UniPDF works well.. Too bad it doesn't allow me to edit the document afterwards though.
I need something free

Free?

You should have said. It is these little details that make us helpful types muck up!

Anyway. Google Docs seems to be capable of doing this.

Disclaimer - I haven't used the method. Please let us know how it goes!

Hey,

Thanks for the help.
Google Docs was promising, but didn't actually capture the words for me.
I couldn't save it as an editable word document after the upload.
I've managed to use an old Adobe Acrobat 5.0 to scan the PDF into images, and then I used ABBYY FineReader Pro 5.0 to capture the words from the images and save it as a Word Document.
I was kinda hoping for a one-click solution

Glad you came right.

Call me weird (or super uber cool, your choice) but I just opened up a PDF in Word Professional Plus 2013 x64 and it's fine. The layout is a tad off, but it's perfectly editable. Did you try that?

That's awesome!
Unfortunately I'm using Office 2010
It depends on the document being used, and whether it's been locked or not.
but that's awesome

GDI_Lord wrote:Call me weird (or super uber cool, your choice) but I just opened up a PDF in Word Professional Plus 2013 x64 and it's fine. The layout is a tad off, but it's perfectly editable. Did you try that?

Proper pdf or scanned?

A PDF printout of directions from Google Maps that was generated using Bullzip PDF Printer

I'd venture a guess and say that a scanned PDF is merely a TIFF image in a PDF container.