I’ve had a countless number of people ask me whether it’s possible to convert a PDF to a Word DOC file. Up until now I had never known of a free application that would do it without having some sort of trial limitations. Thanks to Free PDF to Word Converter you can do it without dropping a dime.
Anyone that has tried converters like this before know how terrible the results can typically be. I gave it a document to convert, which had two pages in it. The first page was a formatted in a typical report fashion with several paragraphs. The second page had tables and text arranged in a rather awkward fashion.
The first time I processed the document I had the “Uses Text-box” option enabled, and the results were rather good. It wasn’t able to detect the bulleted lists, but it replicated the layout pretty close to that of the PDF. Of course it didn’t regenerate the table that I had on the second page, but instead used text boxes to try and make it look the same way as the table did. The problem with using the text boxes is that it makes editing the document more difficult.
On my second conversion of the same document I disabled the use of text boxes. It wasn’t able to reproduce the layout of the table very well, but generally the entire document would be much easier to make changes to. The first page (in a report-like layout) was nearly perfect with spacing, and it would take only minor corrections to get that back to its original state.
So this PDF to DOC converter isn’t perfect, but I don’t think many of them are. You may be thinking that you don’t need this right now, but I suggest bookmarking it. Otherwise down the road you’ll be asking yourself “what was that program?”
Free PDF to Word Converter [via Lifehacker]
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Tags: Freeware, Software, Applications, How To
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I downloaded, installed and tried it and it did a poor job of converting a document. I guess that is why it is free!
I’ll repeat my comment from FreewareGenius,from where Lifehacker picked this up. Someone asked in the Lifhacker comments if it was better than Zamzar.com’s online pdf to doc conversion. I decided to give it a try, just after trying this program. The difference was unbelievable.
Ryan says above, “of course” the table didn’t come out correctly. Zamzar’s conversion gave me text boxes, but not nearly as many as this program - each text box corresponded to a large block of text, rather than a line of text. Not only that, even the table was formatted well.
I suggest bookmarking Zamzar.com instead.
Very true
Thanks Ryan! Any other alternatives?(even it it’s paid)
What about PrimoPDF? http://primopdf.com/
It’s been around for a while and it seems they just came out with an online version to try, if you don’t want to download it. I haven’t tried the online version yet but the downloadable one is great.
I thought that I had heard about PrimoPDF through this website…maybe not.
Well, I think that the recommended program is great. Of course this depend on the needs, but for most of the peoples and most of the cases this program is good enough.
I would also recommend Text Mining Tool (http://text-mining-tool.com).
It is the free PDF, DOC, CHM, RTF, HTML converter. It performs analysis of pdf, doc, rtf, chm, html files and converts them to text.
I tried to download it and my Avast anti virus picked up a virus
Win32: Trojan-Gen {Other}
So I have avoided it.
I don’t think you’ll find any program that can do a perfect job. As Joe said, Zamzar is a better in some instances, but I found that disabling the text box feature in the app made it easier to adjust the text. If you’re just working a report or something simple this program would pretty good, and I don’t think Zamzar has the option to disable using text boxes.
I believe they work the opposite way, creating PDF’s from DOC files.
Tested it and not so happy with the output. There is not many choice out there to choose from so I am sticking with this when the need arise.
After a few times using Free PDF to Word Converter, it kept asking for a use a registration key…the click through takes you to their website and plays with this silly math game so you can guess the key. Then is says. “tired answering the match question?” Then PAY to register. This is NOT freeware but NAGware and it BLOWS! Scammers.
I have just completed a ritual and placed a HEX on all of the creators of the program. Unspeakable, heinous things will happen to all of them as a result of the hex.
For a moment I thought about having mercy of them, but instead decided that they were EVIL to the core and threw a HEX on them that their grandchildren will remember! I mean I did a SHIT BOMB Please pray for them.