I've already commented above about how good this software is when OCR'ing image-based PDFs.

One additional tip for those who want to have the resulting Word file turned into an EPUB for e-readers. After getting the doc file touched up as you like it in Word, save it as HTM or HTML. Then open that file as a webpage in Firefox. Install the addon "GrabMyBooks" in Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/grabmybooks/), "grab" the webpage (or selection) and you've got your e-book!

Since I missed the GAOTD Aiseesoft PDF to Word Converter, I downloaded the Aiseesoft PDF Converter Ultimate-Free (should ultimate by better than simply "converter"?), I gave this software a try by installing it and converting a PDF to Microsoft Office Word 2003. The result were not good. The converted document did not keep the order of the graphics of the original PDF and I had to move the text and graphics myself. I also downloaded the UniPDF to compare converting the same document. The document converted by UniPDF was so true to the original that I thought I was looking at the PDF and not the converted document.
Sorry Aiseesoft PDF Converter Ultimate, I will keep the UniPDF instead.
Thanks Ashraf from dotTech for your recommendation of UniPDF.

Marvelous converter for scanned to JPG and converted to PDF books...Now I can turn them into more editable doc text files...OCR-engine does impressive recognition job even with non-latin characters.

So you get for free capable converter with bonus the award wining Russian-made multilanguage ABBYY OCR-core.

A downside is that OCR-recognition is a bit slow (1-2 min per page), but you have an option to change the speed while sacrificing some accuracy if you have a good scanned PDF.
Also I wished I had more control for the non-OCR fields, but I guess that's a job for the standalone ABBYY OCR Software. And if it was integrated I guess this would bump the price (and the value) of the program due to licensing fees.

I started downloading after I got in from work at about 9 PM & with a slow connection I was cut off when the offer expired with only about 80 MG downloaded. With such a LARGE download it should have been available for two days as someone had suggested. I really wanted to try it. Any ideas for me?

Thanks in advance.

I ran it through several conversions and compared results with Wondershare converter and Nuance free online (Nuance free reader can do a little editing and links to an online converter from within the software) and I found this one to generally do a lot worse than Nuance online for conversions involving text and tables and slightly less well than Wondershare (also downloaded red here on GAOTD).

Windows 7 Home Premium, Intel i3. Installer DOES NOT WORK. Shows me the last page with the license details but nothing in between and the software HAS NOT BEEN INSTALLED!

Pathetic!

cannot download at all, tried 3 browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera) still have chrome and Safari but I doubt I will have success

Alright, it's a huge file to download but unlike any of the freebies that will only capture text, Aiseesoft does an excellent job of converting tables with contents.
And a word of caution against installing the free PDFCore suggested by #23 above. It installs a search bar and customizes your browser even if you deselect during install - nasty.

@40. Sorry my friend but wow, you are very ignorant, it gives countries in the world (and these are many) that doesn't have the infrastructure for high-speed internet everywhere (cables and stuff), that has nothing to do with an outdated hardware more with millions of dollars for investments, do you have them? Also people that visit GOTD came from many parts of the world, there can be a big difference in latency from each to another country and the servers GOTD hosts on. Be happy that you live in a country with good infrastructure and fast internet connection, not everyone has that luck like you. Maybe someone should cut your connection down to 1.024 kbit/s for some weeks or months and then you will know how small 336MB really can be and you will realize fast enough, that you very spoilt.

Also i think many visitors today realized that this filesize is very uncommon for offers on GOTD, that is another reason why the people point it out.

And let's say you only can download with a 1.024 kbit/s connection, how many people will pass on this only because there is no way for shipping or getting an pressed disc after purchase?

My internet cable connection is rated at 20 Mega bits per second. The actual download averaged slightly above 300 Kilo Bytes per second which is equivalent of 3 Mega bits per second. Total download time was 15 minutes. Large - yes. With today's multi-terabyte drives it doesn't even dent their capacity. Long download - not really.

To unzip the file took maybe 10 seconds and the install about 2 minutes. Tested on several files. Perfect conversion on original pdf files. Close to perfect on scanned to pdf files.

To all the whiners about the size of the software:

Properly functioning OCR and accurate interpolation don't come cheap code-wise. Yes, they could reduce the size but then you'd complain that it doesn't work or wasn't accurate enough.

HDD space is dirt-cheap these days. Yield a little real estate for the sake of efficient and working software. Multilanguage support is also something that may be required even with PDF files that are in English... for example quotes from third-party sources.

Think larger my friends. The Internet is Global, not just limited to Hometown, USA. Your PDFs might just as well come from Bulgaria as New York. Layout and reference information in the PDF files just MIGHT not be in English.

I installed Norton Utilities on my PC a few weeks ago. Since then I have tried to install 2 programs from the GAOTD site, and in both cases Norton Said that the .exe programs were causing "Suspicious Activity" and it removed them during the installation attempts.
I have Microsoft Security Essentials, Malwarebytes, and SuperAntispyware also on my PC, and none of these find any problems with the programs, including this Aiseesoft pdf-word converter (which I tried twice to install with same Norton result). I may have to remove Norton because of false positives or else give up on using programs from GAOTD.

As a teacher, I have a need for software that can convert PDF to Word so that students can complete and submit their work to ne digitally. In this regard I have found today's offering to be less-than-adequate in converting PDF files that contain a lot of graphics and tabulated information It just cannot get the formatting anywhere near the original and has difficulty recognising some italics. Sorry to Giovanni (No.23) but your suggestion of Advanced PDF Utilities is even worse in that all it produces is lines of text with no other formatting whatsoever as well as eliminating all graphic images and tables - next to useless for me! I have tested today's offering against its sister product, Wondershare PDF Converter pro, which I also picked up from GAOTD, and have found the earlier offering to be a much more superior product when dealing with lots of tables and graphics. It also does not butcher the original formatting as much as today's giveaway. In fact, it probably keeps over 95% of original formatting. I will keep today's offering as a backup, and for comparison purposes, but, for me, Wondershare PDF Converter Pro is the product of choice.

Just need a PDF to word conversion tool and today's GOTD is what I want. Download, install and register to full function easily. Try to load a PDF file of 100 pages with English and Korean (I think), the output result looked perfect and the conversion speed is acceptable.
I just post my comment to say thank you very much GOTD team and aiseesoft.

No. 2 - stunned at how good Unipdf is, thanks SOOOO much, I am years trying to find a pdf to word convertor that does a decent job, this has made life tons easier!!!!

Tried converting a couple of files. The first one needed a lot of touching up, which I expected, as the PDF had a lot of notations. The second was a pretty simple, straightforward document but the conversion added a lot of gibberish.

Out of curiosity, I downloaded a trial of Foxit PDF Editor and edited the same file much easier with better results.

With only occasional use I can take the time to clean up the output file, but if I had regular need of editing PDFs I'd be better off purchasing a PDF Editor.

I tested it (on W7 64b) and I must say, its OCR facilities are way better than those of the Wondershare PDF Converter Pro.

I am fond of slim and portable software's. 336MB for PDF to Word is too BIG.

Anyway thanks for the offering.

I tried http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf , but its results were terrible in both Office 2000 SR3 with its Word 2007 converter pack addon and Apache OpenOffice v3.4.1. :(

I downloaded using the Opera browser - went a lot faster.

Works fine to very fine with Czech texts.
Format - same problem as with other pdf to Word converters:
good results only when the format of the original is not too complex.
For complex formats, the result may seem good, but do not try to edit it or it falls all apart.

At my 10th attempt, I made finally the entire download of 337 MB.
(previous 9 were interrupted, all with CRC error)

At my 10th attempt, I finally install the thing.
(previous 9 failed)

One reason why the program is large at download, which no one is underlying here is:

it has in the root directory, so called FR engine (size is installed at 822 MB!) Huge....

But if you open the program, there are plenty of languages for OCR including the VB, C, C++ and Fortran.

Dictionary and fonts are close to 90 MB, alone. Resources 70 MB.
The other large size must be seen only by analysts.

The entire program installed is 877 MB!

I think, GAOTD must do in the future few things:

1.) commit to provider extra fast 24 hrs unlimited bandwidth, so we avoid such comics of slow and repetitive downloads

2.) inform us users, not only on download size, as you do now, but ALSO on the INSTALLED size, I guess if you have 877 MB installed,
this is not trivial

Due all mess Aiseesof did today, apologize to users, and make one extra day of free download to all, this GAOTD was bad experience!!!

Thanks.

Wow! I just tried today's program on an image-based (no text) English-language pdf and I'm amazed by the speed and accuracy of the text in the output. It's beautiful! My previous efforts to "Word-ify" this document resulted in poor readability and many textual errors. Not like this! Unfortunately, no illustrations were rendered in the output; the text contained within the illustrations, however, came across very well. As I said above, for text-based PDFs with no illustrations (or only text-based ones), this is a fantastic program.

Thank you Giveaway of the Day!!!

Just to add another $.02: I tried converting a 450+ page text-based pdf with tables and embedded illustrations. Today's offering completed the conversion in ~15 minutes -- very good.

On the negative side: The illustrations did not appear at all; in their positions were blank text boxes. The headings of a two-column table came out in text boxes that were way off from their correct positions, and I couldn't move them without their disappearing to points unseen.

On the positive side: All the text in the resulting .doc file was *exactly* as it was in the original .pdf file: size for size, font for font, italics, bolding, paragraph formatting right on the button. No text boxes were utilized for text other than those pesky headings, as far as I could see.

I didn't try the OCR function.

If I had just text-only pdfs, I would consider this program a winner.

With this in mind, I then tried the small, free, UniPDF program mentioned by Ashraf and Giovanni (http://unipdf.com/), and it converted *everything* including illustrations, tables and text, formatting, etc., point for point. All illustrations were embedded directly in the document (no text boxes), and they and text were in their right places.


So, with these two programs on one's PC, I think one should "have it all" as far as PDFs are concerned.

Frank D

My experiences are similar to solarcat's posting above. I tried the highly recommended free PDFCore program, and found it to be not even close in function to today's giveaway. It's word export is a joke, mainly added so it can match features of other programs on paper. I will probably keep the PDFCore around for it's other tools, but not for conversion. It does nothing more than I could do with a simple text copy and paste into word. Although Aiseesoft's program was not perfect on all of my trials, it is definitely among the best I have tried. Thanks to Aiseesoft and the GOTD team for today's offering. It is a large download but I found it to be well worth the effort!

Initially very interested, I'll pass on this one merely for the outrageous size (this could be a Micro$oft project) for a simple conversion program. If, as some intimate, this size is due to all the language libraries, release the base program in English and have the libraries as one or more separate downloads.

over 300 megs pdf converter ? When Open Office with pdf extension do the same (and more)job.

Before trying this out, be sure you know the difference between a PDF that already has embedded text and one that doesn't (an image-only PDF). There are two relatively simple ways to tell:

1) Open the file in Adobe Reader. Pick a word, any word, in the text. Search (Ctrl-F) for that word and see if Adobe finds it. If so, the text is already in the PDF. If not, the PDF is just an image and requires OCR to extract the text.

2) Open the file in Adobe Reader. From the File menu select Save As -> Text. If the resulting .txt file is empty, there's no text in the PDF and it requires OCR. (Note that there's a "Word or Excel Online" option too. That accesses Adobe's service costing $19.99 per year.)

The important point is that any PDF converter will do a decent job with a PDF that already contains the text, but it takes a specialized converter to do OCR well.

I tried this out on two very challenging image-only PDFs and compared the results from today's GOTD with Giovanni's favorite PDFCore Advanced PDF Utilities Free, which also includes an OCR module. Document A is a complex layout with both images and text (photos and captions). Document B is multi-column text. The Aiseesoft program did an excellent job on both documents. Not perfect, but excellent. It was especially good on Document A.

As for PDFCore, not so much. The OCR on Document B failed completely, giving total gibberish. On Document A it got some of the text right but there were so many errors that the result was unusable.

Verdict: Two thumbs up for Aiseesoft and today's GOTD.

And to everyone complaining about the large download size, I'll repeat what's already been posted here. This software includes a high-end, multi-language OCR library from a third party. That's why it's so big, and that's why it works so much better in my tests.

unable to download the huge setup so decided to try Mr Giovanni’s recommended tools from http://www.pdfcore.com and http://unipdf.com
to convert a document to word but both failed in keeping the tables of the document intact.

Does anyone know of a program that will convert .pdfs to M/S Works word processor (.wps) format?

I would love to have installed this software but at 336MB and from what I have read that it expands to 1GB, this is just not an option. Shame!

Thanks for this converter, though it seems to need a lot of improvement before someone should pay anything close to $35 for it. I converted the 64 page, 979 KB New Dash Diet booklet from the NIH as a test. It completed the conversion in just over 2 minutes and resulted in an 86 page 1,707 KB 1997-2003 doc file. Most of the tables were intact but some things entered in columns came out messed up. The Word right, left and top and bottom margins became a little smaller than the "100%" size appears in the original pdf file.

Yes it' big, but something like this is very useful to me so I tried it despite the size, and I must say I am impressed with the results, and all text is true OCR and editable. Very nice software and definitely a keeper.. also the resulting conversion is much smaller than the original PDFs format.

Wish this had been offered 6 months ago when I needed a program like this for my online college course. I was using an online email version that sometimes didn't send me my converted doc in time, adding more stress to my already stressful college work.

Thanks so much for offering this, I don't know why people are complaining about the size it downloaded in under 10 minutes, I guess everyone wants it to be INSTANT. LOL

Just so happened I had this really huge pdf file (5000 pages) which I needed to convert to Word (the whole thing didn't make sense to me either, but still, had to do it)

From a previous download I have another pdf to Word converter, which claims output to Word but only gives output as rtf. It ran the conversion, but never produced the file. So I split the pdf into smaller 1000 page files and voila. Once I loaded the rtf into Word 2003, it converted to Word format and I got a Word file that looked like the original. Conversion from rtf to Word 2007 was not useable, formatting was off.

Tried the same task with today's download: first try of 1000 page pdf kept running and running. Finally killed it.
Tried a smaller pdf with only 100 pages to rtf anf got a file, but formatting is off and the frames around some text disappeared.
Second try to Word 2003 - same problem.
Third try to Word 2007 (1000 pages) .. still running and I doubt it will ever finish.

By the way .. stopping doesn't work, had to kill with the Taskmanager.

Will give it some invoices to convert, if those fail as well, I'm sorry to say it won't be a keeper.

One more warning!
The software, while unistalled using their factor uninstaller, leaves (ie. does not remove) its own entries in the register and at least 2 files on the system hard disc!
And they needed to produce an installation file of more than 350 MB (after unpack) to provide such a rubbish!

Aiseesoft will need to work really hard to regain my confidence (if any) in a far future.

Just installed and tested. Here’s my quick rewiev based on the conversion of a few documents:
– A pdf document exclusively in English with a complex structure was converted correctly;
– A pdf document in Polish with an image oriented vertically, requiring OCR, totally failed to recognise Polish diacritics although the Polish language (along with English) was on the list of languages to be recognised by the software; the orientation of text and recognition of purely latin characters was correct;
– A pdf document in Polish with an image oriented horizontally, requiring OCR, failed totally – neither OCR worked correctly and the orientation of letters was anything but an unrecognisable mess of signs and graphics.
– A pdf document in Polish with insertions in English and French resulted in a rtf document with non-English characters replaced by weird letters, although all three languages were on the list of languages (allegedly) recognisable by the softare.

In each case, the software worked reasonably fast.

Summary:
1. Non-English characters are recognised correctly neither by OCR nor by the conversion engine even though the relevant language(s) is(are) on the list of languages to be recognised by the software, let alone pdfs in several languages;
2. OCR does not recognise horizontal images embedded in the pdf.

I did not try other options as the aforementioned results disqualify any conversion software in my opinion.

Total disappointment!!! Uninsalled!

PS. Why, on earth, software providers offer such a bad and undeveloped software only to have the software get known to public to be good for nothing?

226MB... Oly Moly... Passing on this glut. LibreOffice is smaller and significantly better featured. Does this download include all of Aieesoft's trial programs?

I have no problem ever with downloading a little file like this one.
It's only megabytes, not gigabytes. Just because some people have dinosaur computers or live where there are no high speed internet servers is no reason to judge this software negatively.
Get your computer running up to today's standards and then come here to post an opinion. This is a small download for me.
Giovanni - that's some troll post you did. The moderators should just censor it.

Nice program, Aiseesoft! I can use this to save all those manuals and things that I always have to use Adobe Acrobat to read. The .doc file extension is universally readable for anyone and is small in size. Perfect!

I think it would be a better headliner for you to advertise this as something other than, "PDF to Word Converter". I don't use Word and some people do not have Word - but, as I stated, the .doc extension is universal.

Thanks for the opportunity to try this out!

I am a software developer and this software IS JUST TOO LARGE.
Not everyone has high-speed Internet, so Aiseesoft, PLEASE PARE DOWN or compile your software with better C libraries!!!

First thing I noticed, no ability to drag and drop files to be converted. This would be a helpful addition, rather then navigating via explorer.

Secondly, would be nice to see the ability to save into OpenOffice format as well, since not all of us own Word.

Third, after a scan with accuracy as the highest factor, I noticed that the formatting was no where near what the original looked like. Sure I can edit the document, but it shouldn't be marketed as layout and formatting remaining the same.

Fourth, the image scan was extremely inaccurate. Now in this particular file I tested it on, there was only the one image...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/eayni2fkiu6dcyn/before-after.jpg
You will see the original image and then the "scanned" image in the above file.

Others mention size as a factor, however if this had worked as promised, then the size wouldn't be a problem. But with the amount of issues and errors still in this software, the size seems to bloat the software instead.

Download, install and registered successfully with both of my laptop windows 7 64bit and my desktop an old xp 32bit.
I'd like to say that today's giveaway is great although the size is a little bit large more than 300MB. But it is not a problem for me.
Test it with a PDF file with pictures and tables the result is great. It outputs .docx files with the same as the PDF file and I can edit the .docx file easily. I think I will keep it on my laptop and use it for some use. I have also tested it with another PDF files that contains Korean and it outputs exact the same one to .docx file.
Thanks to GOTD and Aiseesoft.

336 MB?! What is going on here?
The company should explain here with a comment why this file is so large? Some PDF converters are 2 or 3 MB.
So, what features make this software file so big?

Large download but installation itself requires close to 1GB. I had my doubts about th ecapability of the program - convert PDF to Word - and after reading the other comments I cancelled the installation - not worth the disk space on my laptop. I might try it on a desktop with a bigger harddrive but with the size of the program and the installation bringing my laptop to a crawl, I'll pass on this one.

Finally I have finished the downloading.
Install and register with the code easily. Try to convert one of my PDF files to .docx with it, the output .docx has right format as the input PDF files and fast. General speaking, it is a nice software as the Lizzy said it contains many langugaes, so the size is really big.
I'll keep this for future usage. Thank you GOTD and aiseesoft. Thanks.
BTW, I have the last giveaway from Aiseesoft and it works well till now.

This program has a marvelous size and yet, I tried to download it and it gave me speed only 10 Kbps. Now, I only get less than 1Kpbs. I should pass this or maybe GAOTD can provide alternate links in order we can choose alternative links if the link that is currently down or having to many people downloading.
Merry Christmas to all GAOTD-ers

Can anyone tell me if they know if any of the above-listed conversion programs are compatible with/capable of conversion to Corel WordPerfect -- which is the only such program that I use? Thanks!

Granted this software is offered for free today, but I fail to see why anyone would purchase a software dedicated to nothing but one conversion function. I think it is safe to say that anyone with the need to convert pdf to word or any other format is likely to need the ability to convert to other formats from time to time. For that reason, it is my opinion that it is worth the extra cost to spring for a professional pdf reader/converter all in one software such as Nitro PDF Pro v.8. Yes, the software is $119.00. However, that is MUCH cheaper than Adobe Pro yet has as many, if not more, overall options including, but not limited to, conversions. Speaking only for myself, I find that most of my conversions are to pdf and not vise versa. JMO

this is the first and to my best knowladge the only PDF converter that handlers LTR languages such as Hebrew.
works like a magic
For me it is one of the best GAOTD.

Specification of PDF to Word Converter
Aiseesoft PDF to Word Converter enables you to input PDF format, and output Microsoft Word 97-2003 (*.doc), Microsoft Word 2007 (*.docx), Rich Text Format (*.rtf) formats.