atrax27407 Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 Does anyone happen to have a simple, free PDF to WORD conversion program for Windows 10 that they could send my way? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Asmusr Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 (edited) 6 minutes ago, atrax27407 said: Does anyone happen to have a simple, free PDF to WORD conversion program for Windows 10 that they could send my way? My version of Word can read (and edit) PDFs. Edited June 17, 2022 by Asmusr 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mizapf Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 I think the general problem of editing PDF is that the document structure may be very different from what you see. PDF is a page description language and not a text editor format. LibreOffice can also import and edit PDF(as a drawing). 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pixelpedant Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 Yeah, if you want something vaguely or partially useful within Word, surely Word itself is the best tool. But as Mizapf says, when it comes to turning a PDF into a document an application like Word can edit, your mileage will always an necessarily hugely vary, but lean in the direction of limited returns. Since a PDF can be pretty much anything. In our community, they're often JPEG-compressed images of the document, with overlayed invisible text (produced via OCR software) providing something that can be used to locate or copy text within the document. But these are in most cases more or less totally devoid of any larger document structure. So it is usually going to be impossible to really usefully "convert" it to a structure native to a given document editor. Since where document structure is concerned, for the most part, there isn't one. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GDMike Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 49 minutes ago, atrax27407 said: Does anyone happen to have a simple, free PDF to WORD conversion program for Windows 10 that they could send my way? How to send the file. Atariage doesn't allow large files to be uploaded. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atrax27407 Posted June 17, 2022 Author Share Posted June 17, 2022 send it to: Rmcarmany@gmail.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+FarmerPotato Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 Converting PDFs drives me crazy. In the best case, the text is computer-readable, and in a PDF Viewer you can copy it to the clipboard. One chunk at a time. More often, the elements of the PDF don’t get drawn left-to-right across the page, and your clipboard gets words or lines out of order. They tend to stay in decent clumps, but sometimes the spaces are in, sometimes not! In a manual scanned on Bitsavers, there is a pretty good OCR scan, providing a text layer over the compressed TIFF. But… the elements are not ordered left-to-right consistently. And there’s no imaginary grid. It’s like a kid put magnet letters on the fridge. Multi-column text… watch what happens when you mouse over a selection. When I want to get articles out of magazine OCR scans, I end up with a raw mess. You know what’s easier than unscrambling the OCR text? It has been easier to READ the PDF out loud to Siri, and fix the errors after that. 2 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GDMike Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 58 minutes ago, atrax27407 said: send it to: Rmcarmany@gmail.com Can't send by email. It's too large for email Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GDMike Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 20 minutes ago, FarmerPotato said: Converting PDFs drives me crazy. In the best case, the text is computer-readable, and in a PDF Viewer you can copy it to the clipboard. One chunk at a time. More often, the elements of the PDF don’t get drawn left-to-right across the page, and your clipboard gets words or lines out of order. They tend to stay in decent clumps, but sometimes the spaces are in, sometimes not! In a manual scanned on Bitsavers, there is a pretty good OCR scan, providing a text layer over the compressed TIFF. But… the elements are not ordered left-to-right consistently. And there’s no imaginary grid. It’s like a kid put magnet letters on the fridge. Multi-column text… watch what happens when you mouse over a selection. When I want to get articles out of magazine OCR scans, I end up with a raw mess. You know what’s easier than unscrambling the OCR text? It has been easier to READ the PDF out loud to Siri, and fix the errors after that. I use word for everything for a PC. Then I use my program, SNP for my own docs. I can cut and paste from classic 99 into SNP as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GDMike Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 3 minutes ago, GDMike said: Can't send by email. It's too large for email Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+arcadeshopper Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 20 minutes ago, GDMike said: use drive to send large files.. or dropbox Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mizapf Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 PDFs of more than 25 MB sound very much like embedded graphics. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atrax27407 Posted June 17, 2022 Author Share Posted June 17, 2022 Found a small utility on CNET that works with a minor annoyance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrMaddog Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 You can edit PDF's in LibreOffice, but it uses the Drawing program instead of the word processor. And each text line is in a "table" so beware of that, but you can still edit or cut/paste it... 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InfiniteTape Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 Pandoc might be able to do it: https://pandoc.org/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SkyPilot Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 (edited) I use https://pixillion-plus-image-converter.en.softonic.com/ One can compress files as well. There is also https://www.nchsoftware.com/documentconvert/ Edited June 17, 2022 by SkyPilot 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mizapf Posted June 17, 2022 Share Posted June 17, 2022 1 hour ago, MrMaddog said: You can edit PDF's in LibreOffice, but it uses the Drawing program instead of the word processor. And each text line is in a "table" so beware of that, but you can still edit or cut/paste it... Yes, and that makes sense, as I said above, because most PDF files are no text in the sense that we have in a word processor. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.