#54 - "This is a converter *to* pdf, not *from* pdf."

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.

# 82 Hey AxCut you had me perform a lengthy search for a "Zanzibar" converter on the Web, until I realized you meant... Zamzar, the online converter I once visited! I should have known ;-)

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!

This program not support Unicode characters! Here is a special words, these include ALL special hungarian characters:
árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép
Just test with this, and look...

I'm a mathematician and I get a lot of journal articles in pdf. Most of them contain complex math equations and are usually created using LaTex (actually this is a requisite for Ph.D. disserttion) and then printed to .pdf.

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

#17 this was re-offered while some of us had no electricity due to IKE. I missed it as well. 14 days with no electric. I was wanting to try that out. Maybe GAoTD will re-offer this for us poor survivors that lost so much to the hurricane. (sob sob - did that help?)

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.

Hi BBGamer (#20), as mentioned before: I'd spent hours browsing for a PDF converter, and tried a few. Some imprinted watermarks, and some produced output with garbled characters--totally unreadable! doPDF ( only 1.4MB--download it from: snurl.com/3tz92 ) has been working flawlessly printing out PDF files, such as this ( snurl.com/3tz8g ) from a Chinese text file without any watermarks!

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!

TO 76. Fubar:

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! :-)

The GOTD version is different from the licensed version. If one puts a link to pdf2text.exe in XP's Send To folder or if one attempts to run pdf2text.exe from the command line, as in


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/

#70...No, that is not what this software does, or claims to do. You are looking for OCR software, which can attempt to read text from an image file (that is all that a scanned PDF is - an image file wrapped in a PDF shell.

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.

#47, Terry_in_Texas, I haven't investigated freeware PDF OCR packages. Some people have mentioned a couple of freeware OCR apps, but they don't support PDF AFAIK. For serious PDF and OCR (they have other stuff, including the top voice-recognition app), I recommend Nuance products, but they're commercial. Their imaging products all support OCR and PDF. They all overlap in functionality, but also have differences. While some of the products are expensive, after you get any Nuance product, they'll generally offer you the top version of any of their other products for $100 (this is especially true if you have the top version of any of their products).

They have OmniPage, PaperPort, and PDF Converter (these links are to the feature comparison matrices rather than the main pages--note that you must click "Next page" at the bottom of each PDF Converter page, it goes on for six pages). Each contains older or standard versions of some of the other products. OmniPage is the serious OCR app, the other products contain older and lesser versions of it (of course, they'll use a newer version, if installed). PaperPort is for those who want to organize all of their documents as PDFs. PDF Converter is more serious about PDF conversion and editing. All of Nuance's imaging products are heavily PDF-oriented, all do OCR.

#4: When I "select all" followed by "copy" in Adobe Reader 8, only the displayed page is selected and copied to the clipboard. PDF to Text converted the entire file to text.

PDF to Text's handling of white space and underlined text was spotty. In one pdf file, for example,

Date                                                   Centered Text

became

Date                                                                                                            Centered Text

and
1.  Ordinary text

became

1.                                                                                                                Ordinary text

NOT IMPRESSED AT ALL.

Number 22, just delete the manifest file. Don't understand why I got so many negative comments, this suggestion helped a lot of people in previous PDF converters giveaways.

To number 20:
Only if it's an active text Adobe Reader document!!!!

To no. 4:
You can only paste and copy (or vice versa) if the Adobe Reader document is an active text, document, so it doesn't work all the time.

-Webmaster

Scanned pages into PDF from printer.

This convertor will not convert to Text in Notepad.
#4, your suggestion didn't work either.
I have Vista Home Premium

Thank you, but this one won't work for me.

#64: Well, duh... of course they don't. To get text from images, you need OCR...

Can you use this to convert scanned PDF pages (usually are crooked and not neat) into text?

This is for them who are not satistied enough and advocating for the folowing theory-

CTRL+A > CTRL+C > Open an Editor > CTRL+V

Yap! That is correct...you can convert your .pdf to.txt this way also.
But what if you need a .pdf file, say of 1000 pages, right away?
USE THIS!
Two thumbs up GAoTD Team for giving away all three nice "Quick pdf" softwares.After all, all are free! The finest point for the buyers is no one will feel pain to spend a few bucks for these s/ws unlke coughing up huge money for OCR s/ws like ABBYY,Solid Documents etc. etc.

Thank you #13 Fubar for your well-written information. As I am just recoverying from having to do a recovery because an auto Microsoft download did a number on my computer, I think I will pass on this software at least until I get my computer running the way it used to.

Thanks also to #4. I read your comment. Very concise and true and got my chuckle for the day as this is how I normally "convert" my documents.

this is great! =) i have a bunch of books in pdf! now i can put them on a portable device and read them! thanks gaotd!!! =)

#41 xvolution, Thank you, that was my question and you answered it. With the .pdf to word and the pdf. to html... I found that the programs did not pull words out of the images.. I did find that using ONENOTE by Microsoft and then you have to COPY TEXT FROM PICTURES, but it doesn't format very well.

What I am trying to find is something that will work at copying text from .pdf files so that I can copy the words into my TEXT ALOUD program and speak the words to an mp3 and listen to the .pdf files at the chosen speed, pitch, and voice I like... this enables me to listen to these long .pdfs for my masters degree program.

A program that can copy text from pictures and format it into a word or text file would be a huge time saver for me.

forgot to add in previous comment
Thank You for this converter.

"If you D/L’d PDF to WORD then you don’t need either of these other two offerings.

Also, my copy of Adobe gives me the option to save as text??"
from terry number 12 posting

the books i buy only come in pdf or microsoft reader.
my pda only has a txt reader in it.
so i do need a converter. i do not have adobe pdf on my computer and also i do not have reader either.

posted Mondays free games a few hours ago:

Elder Scrolls I and a couple of Starwraith games:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/3991

XP Pro-SP3
Installed and ran program. Chose file to convert. Clicked convert. Program says done. No converted file anywhere! Tried both "New Directory", and "Default Directory". Nothing. Did a "File Search" for file - found original listed, and that's all!

I have no use for this as I already use Free PDF to Word Doc converter by hellopdf.com - Its free and better. It not only extracts text but also retains images by converting .pdf into .doc files.

#4 and #36.

you can use #4's method to copy a pdf file and use 'ctl v' to paste it to an email.

the resulting document is the same as the original pdf but it's double spaced. can't figure out how to make it single space.

this method works well on the ones i've tried it on.

uhhhhhhhhh Adobe Reader already saves as text. Why just rehash what already works fine? Why an extra app to do the same thing?

If you want a less laggy version of Acrobat, just get FoxIt (http://www.download.com/Foxit-Reader/3000-2079_4-10313206.html)

If you don't think there is a use for this then I have one.
I use text to speech software. Yet many books come in pdf format,
This will make them speak-able :)
(with probably some minor clean-ups)

#20 - there are plenty of free programs that convert Word to PDF. Try PrimoPDF - you can download it here:

http://www.primopdf.com/

Like pretty much all PDF creators, it installs as a virtual printer - you create the PDF by “printing” your document to the PDF printer. So most applications that can print can be used to create PDFs. Your PDF will look like the printed page(s).

This is a converter *to* pdf, not *from* pdf.

By the way, note the link at the very foot of their page - "Download PrimoPDF Source Code" - the program uses GPL code and is therefore itself under the GPL. I suspect all the others they sell are too.

However if you're looking for a converter *from* pdf, there's another company that sells pdf converters, also based on GPL software: VeryPDF ( http://www.verypdf.com/pdf2word/ ) - if you look in that page closely too, you'll also find a small link to the source code: http://www.globalpdf.com/pdf2word/pdf2word_src.zip Again, same applies to their other products.

So programmers, you should have no trouble with making any custom pdf tools that you might need :-) (As long as you have the M$ C compiler, as neither one is very portable code...)

This is so frustrating, what is it with these PDF conversion programs. pdftotext showed the same error as did pdftoword program. "Unable to open, application configuration is wrong"

If anyone is interested, Adobe has an online pdf to text and pdf to html converter:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html
(as long as you don't mind the possibility of someone at Adobe seeing your content)

not to get alittle angry
but i know gotd is free and whatnot
but how about some sort of voting system for programs that are needed
these pdf stuff and screensavers are pretty sad
Vaughn

Thumbs UP!!!It converted a PDF that was "secured" to text.... something that I was looking for because I wanted to print out the instructions without any of the images... Had tried several free converters and none worked... I was reluctant to try... but what the heck I can always uninstall...in my case wasn't interested in retaining the format of the original.... since I had paid for the lessons[pdf] I felt I should be able to print out what I want from them...
Thanks GOTD
Carol

Downloaded and installed. Tried to covert a small PDF to text.
GUI told me conversion was successful. It wasn't. An empty text file was all that was created. Tried twice more. NG
First time Givaway of the day has failed me.

Freeware alternative: Some PDF to Txt Converter 1.4

Pro: That one can do batch conversion.
Con: It crashes if you try to converse a PDF that doesn't allow copying.
Other than that it's excellent, and free.

TO 13. Fubar and 29. Webzap:

Since both of you seem to have tested the software more than others, please tell me if it will convert a PDF that is actually scanned images rather than formatted text.

The free converters I've found (and there are many) can't handle that at all, since it involves OCR'ing those images.

The only semi-affordable software I've found that does a good job (although it still needs to be cleaned up afterwards) is ABBYY's PDF Transformer at $100. which includes PDF creation, or its previous version for $50, which leaves out the PDF creation part -- which is OK, since there are plenty of free PDF printers out there.

Thanks, guys!

Another great utility for the professional on a tight budget (Me)!
Thank you again.
www.JacksonSnyder.com

There are several ways to create pdf files, & different versions of pdf files... What you get out of the developers' products depends on the pdf you give it to convert.

Likewise there are different text editors & text formatting - you'll often see this opening text files from a MAC or Linux in Notepad vs Wordpad. Whether you copy/paste or use a converter, the results can look different depending on the program you use to open the text file.

As far as Visual Basic & files used & registered... If you don't run any other VB programs, the changes made by the PDF converters don't matter. If the VB programs you run put things back when you start them, it doesn't matter. Installing the latest VB runtime from Microsoft puts things back in XP - haven't tried in Vista. Using Erunt to back up, then restore your registry after installation puts things back. Installing to another drive where restore is not turned on, then using Windows Restore puts things back. Download Regdrop.exe (google) & put it on your desktop... Dragging comctl32.ocx (or any ocx file) on top of regdrop registers that file in Windows, rather than the file in the program's folder.

Thumbs up! It's a great offer and is perfect for some of my tasks, especially when all I want is plain text. Also I want to point out, although it's true that Adobe Reader has the save as txt option, it doesn't work on all pdf files. And some pdf's you can't copy and paste info as text on notepad either. It could be because the pdf originated from a Vista and my computer's not, but regardless I must notify my client to resend as a doc file. Hopefully this will solve all of those problems.

Trued with four different PDF files. Program showed successful converstion, but no text was in file.

Tried to convert 3 documents. Each time showed successful converstion but text file was empty

It will not convert pdfs that contain images. I tried it with an old magazine scan converted to pdf and I ended up with an empty txt file.

# 35: I know there's a delay for moderation, but 4 hours? And what's that blurb you noticed? I wrote "But 47% percent of thumbs down?". Maybe you have a problem with your browser when reading text entered with an European character set and/or keyboard? # 25's browser apparently displayed this correctly...

Hey Melodia.
Sorry I didn't read your comment before entering my second one. But, as you can read from my # 26, I go for a thumbs down this time. But that's only after extensive testing... I object to those thumbs down from people who have not even bother to try their gifts out. But you can see that I do not "full and completely approve of the 53% thumbs up" as well!

For those interested, the Ctrl A - Ctrl C - Ctrl V procedure doesn't work on protected documents with my favourite Foxit Reader. Their feature rich Pro Pack (at $ 39 definitely a better buy as the one submitted here, since it does a lot more...) does include a PDF to TXT converter, but, since the feature is unavailable in the free version, I could not test it out. On an unprotected 5 column document it gave a tidy, albeit one column, result. And this is, of course, very fast as well. I'll stick to that for plain conversions to .txt !

@34: The plain text file-format doesn't support graphics either just the plain, unformatted text

One of Kafka's little parables: "Leopards break into the temple and eat the sacred host. This happens again and again. Soon it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony."

That's how I feel about the thumbs up and thumbs down. If it's less than 25/50 in favor, I generally don't bother. If it's about 50/50, I'll give the materials a quick glance. When it starts getting to 60/40, I pay more attention. On those rare occasions when it's 75/25 or better, I read every word.

To the people that say you can just copy and paste from pdf to notepad... yes, most cases you can do that but the formatting is always messed up.

And it will take hours to fix it, if it's a document with lots of pages. Hence the need for such software.

#21: Apparently you haven't noticed yet that the comments are moderated - and as such delayed. Thanks for yet another totally useless "t3h noes, why so many thumbs down?!" blurb...