Isn’t that what I said? That’s what #20 was asking for, something that does just the opposite of this giveaway, a.k.a. converting *to* PDF.

Anyway, thanks for the editing suggestions.

# 45 I don’t see any difference with the “Example” text file when I open it in Wordpad, besides the fact the latter (as does MS Word 2002) uses Courier New, a font that makes the output appear clearer though.

To All.
In my comment (#34) about conversion respecting the layout, I forgot to mention the “emptiness” of the help file. Thinking I was doing something wrong (even an old bat eventually will!) I hoped to find an answer her. Alas, the left pane and the tabs of the help file are populated. The right pane isn’t. So I tried the “Internet Homepage” line in the “Help” menu: no link! I then paid a visit to their site. No “Help” details there either, only a “Support” tab leading to a “Technical Support” form. Here I didn’t bother, as we all know GAOTD nice offerings are… unsupported ones!

Latex is a typesetting set of programs (based om Tex) and learning to write journal articles with it is not an easy task.

So I tried today’s offering (I used Returnil because I don’t like my dll’s registered in the wrong places) and fed it a .pdf article titled “One path to acoustic cloaking” which is chocked full of math formulas and what it gave out was garbage. I didn’t expect the math equations to be readable, but the text was horrible. So I restarted my computer and Pdf-To-Text became history.

I got curious about some of the postings here, so I tried some of the products mentioned here. Zanzibar beat them all hands down. Conversion to text garbled the equations, but like I said before you can’t expect a program to create readable complex Math equations in plain text.

So I converted to .rtf and opened it with Open Office. I was astounded. 90% of the Math equations were identical and of course, editable. Thanks a million to the person who posted Zanzibar’s web page. I have a feeling that Zanzibar and I are going to be good friends.

AxCut

Just kidding, like most comments tell you, it still messes up the formatting, so, think on the bright side, they still need humans for something, hehe.

If you set–1> right click on any PDF files, 2> click “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file,” and 3> browse to select
CoolPDF to open PDF files, they will be opened immediately after doPDF has done conversion for you to check if the output is satisfactory. CoolPDF ( snurl.com/3tz8t ) works as a single executable. Its size is only 626KB! CoolPDF saves PDF into Text, JPG, etc!

Using FireFox, I decided to use the addon–SreenGrab ( snurl.com/3tz8o ) to take a screenshot of a WHOLE page. The beauty is that the jpg output can be uploaded automatically into my registered ImageBAM–a free image hosting account. Hence, no real estate of my hard disk is occupied, and the screen shots can be accessed in my ImageBAM account anywhere I go. Links for HTML and others are also generated for web deployment.

In compariosn, output in JPG and PDF are about the same size.

The latest versions are uploaded for download from the links given above. They are all freewares!

Thanks for confirming that today’s software would be useless for me, as I suspected would be the case. Most PDF’s I get are scanned images which have to be OCR’d in order to work with them.

For “regular” PDF’s, there are plenty of free converters, most of which handle them just fine.

At the $50 price-point of today’s software, I was really hoping it would OCR, since ABBYY’s PDF Transformer v1 costs the same and does do OCR.

Considering the other things that have been said about this vendor’s software and the changes it does to the system, I’m glad I didn’t try it out only to find out it didn’t work.

Again, thank you! It’s helpful users like you who really make GOTD a worthwhile site to visit daily! :-)

C:\Program Files\PDF to Text\pdf2text.exe example.pdf

the program responds with the popup

       Command-line mode is enabled only in the licensed version.       Please purchase PDF to TEXT at http://www.quick-pdf.com/

This software is for true PDF files (ie printed from a word doc, etc.) only. It appears to do what it was designed to do.