@Peter Blaise: Answering your concerns, here is the wikipedia page of the website. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamzar
It has a Alexa ranking of 4235 and that is pretty awesome. It takes some time since a lot of people use it and its free. Imagine a server tending to requests from all over the world, all the time. And if you still have safety issues, even after the wiki page and Alexa ranking, then I should tell you that Zamzar has been doing what it does right now since 8years. If something untoward had had happened, then I think it would have lost the people's trust and it would have disappeared like many other online conversion sites.

@XP-Man: Spaces were missing! Damn that's f'd up. But do try other formats, it works wonderfully well.

#18 - After installing UNIPDF and before the Finish box, there are 3 or 4 offers which you can decline individually. After Finish, a website will open with another offer which you can decline by closing out the window and your installation is ready for use. I also installed NEMO PDFtoWord and was very disappointed. I had UNIPDF and Nemo convert the same file and the results could not have been any more opposite. UNIPDF produced a converted word file document and although NEMO indicated a completed conversion, the file was blank when opened.

I may give PDF to X a try as replacement for NEMO but for now UNIPDF is the solution I recommend, although it is limited in conversion formats.

Anyone know of a program that will minimize a PDF (not by OCR)?
I scanned a document as a PDF and it comes in at 65mb.

I'd like a program that converts the pages to JPG images and then reassembles it into a PDF. When I do it manually it comes down from 65mb to 10mb. Anyone know of a program that does this automatically?

Reply to:

#4.Seriously… $29 BUCKS!!!
Adobe direct will do it for $1.99 month annually and with that, you get TRUE ADOBE PRODUCT CONVERSION….

It may be free today…but $29 bucks!! C’mon man

Comment by boozehelps — March 5th, 2014 at 3:55 am

So... $2.00/mo X 12months = $24.00/yr.

Essentially you are suggesting that renting a piece of software with a 1-year subscription cost of $24.00+/- is better than owning a lifetime license to a competitor's software for $29.00?

I always thought owning was better than renting and it seems to apply to this scenario too. This proves that a lot of people feel that renting is better than owning - even when there is no real difference in price/cost.

I compared this tool with MS Word 2013. My result:

Word created a 488KB file. When using RTF the size was 2325KB. PDF to X used 4541 KB for RTF.
PDF to X conversion

MS Word conversion
I used an English language PDF (1486 KB) supplied by gutenberg.org for the testing. I trust the conversions speak for themselves.
I did both conversions with Word in less time than PDF to X took.

Even given that I paid about $100 for the Office package with these results the money for the office package is less dear than the $29 for PDF to X.

I uninstalled this tool.

To Ashraf: You sound like you are having an off day. Get yourself a hot drink, put your feet up and relax for a while - GOTD will still be here when you feel up to it. Love your reviews, and very very grateful to have someone like you, and Giovanni to help us.

To Guest7: I understand you may be new to this forum and (to some people) jumped the gun with your statement above. True, it was a bad review, but as you just found out, Ashraf is a very big part of this forum, hence the responses. People sometimes forget not everybody has been here before. If you didn't know don't take it personally, we all enjoy the participation of everyone, so, come back, you seem to try out the software and we need opinions. If you did know, well, harsh, everybody has busy or off days.

@ Guest 7, post #9: QUOTE: "That is a pretty pathetic attempt at plugging your own site while offering nothing at all about the product in question. No wonder it’s being voted as an “unuseful” comment… Like others here I did try it out and found it a bit buggy and unreliable and not especially great over and above some other tools you can get."

Thanks for that supremely non-constructive comment. Now: would you care to spend as much time as Ashraf does, providing GAOTDers with informative insights into software offers and their possible alternatives? Would you like to amplify your stunningly unhelpful remark about "some other tools you can get"? Which tools? Where? And what specific individual performance?

Nah. Didn't think so. Post again with a change of name, if you like, but it still won't alter the fact that 1 x Ashraf is worth 10,000 and more x "pathetic" Guest 7s.

#24, chamlin - I clicked Ashraf’s link (http://dottech.org/89142/windows-best-free-pdf-to-word-converter-pdf-to-doc-or-rtf/ ) and from that page the UniPDF link ( unipdf.com/ ) . I used the download from that page and that was the corrupt version or version with PUPs. Just wanted others to be aware - some of these PUPs are absolutely vile!
I trust Ashraf & like his reviews. I have followed hes recommendations in the past.

I would like to support the messages defending Ashraf. Everybody knows that he has a site to which he devotes a lot of time in order to provide excellent information about free programs that must have been invaluable to hundreds of thousands of people over the years - perhaps millions!

Accusing him of plugging his site is evidence that this person does not understand the immense contribution Ashraf has made to making GOTD the valuable resource that it is.

Why doesn't the "register" button disappear when you have REGISTERED. Very utilitarian GUI - not much imagination for $29 - I tried a few seems to do what it says - still working on some 100+ page PDF's - we'll see - Thank you GOTD & Trisun for your offering today.

Ouch. Man, Ashraf got sooooo slammed for his comment. I understand that he didn't, this one time, go into an elaborate post. Bur really, the guy has contributed so much to this site and my computer life that I just needed to stand for him.

#18, wysguyeman, I installed UNIPDF directly from their site on a Win 7 system last week, and didn't get any additional crap in my system. Not sure what happened with yours. Did you DL from the unipdf site or some other?

Anywho, hats off to all who contribute worthwhile input here.

@9 guest7

Never heard of you before. Hope we get more of your valuable comments upvoted to about 100 just for 4 lines (netto 3 lines).

If you were a true GOTD user and had visited Ashraf's site yourself you would be very grateful for his unrivalled comments which have been often very useful to me and others. Ashraf is one of the pillars of GOTD comments. Somebody else comparing software in depth?

But to go back to true and useful comments:
I have tried a lot of PDF converters. If they can handle text from pic-PDF they are all based on commercial or free OCR engines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_optical_character_recognition_software

Commercial OCR engine from ABBYY in my opinion still is best. I got scan-restricted ReadIris with my Kodak scanner-printer and Omnipage from a magazine.

Some free and commercial GOTD seemed to be be based on Google's Tesseract engine with not so satisfying results. For me it seems to be unfair to charge money for a frontend to free software.

If I'm in need I try every PDF converter software available and combine best results by cut&paste. If I need perfect quality I use my best OCR software to convert each page as a pic as XP-man some time ago discribed too.

Concerning GOTD only, Wondershare PDF to Word Converter from 2013-07-17 in my opinion was best till now.

@guest7, post #9. There are two posters here who regularly make valuable contributions, Ashraf and Giovanni. I have yet to be misled by either of them. You, on the other hand, have contributed nothing. I know this will get a lot of negative votes, but I don't care. You who don't appreciate these two guys may drive them off, and then this site will be less valuable.

I use Open Office and do not have MS Office. Open Office has conversion to an old .doc format, but they imply it's not 100% accurate, and it's an extra step that I'd rather not take.

Most of the PDF converters don't mention if they work with .odt (Open Office) files. Does this one? Do any of them?

@ Fefferbean

Thanks for your info. The above program install in the correct "program" folder only unistall.dat % uninstall.exe. All other parts are in C:\Users\xxxxx\AppData\Roaming\PDF Helper where they simply should not be...

@Aaron Farnsworth -- I note that free web file conversion site alternative Zamzar is NOT secure (because your file leaves your computer) and does not handle large files nor frequent / many files at a time.

UNIPDF:
When I tried to download UniPDF, Chrome notified that it contained potentially harmful content and would not download. IE had no problem downloading. When installing, Conduit & other unwanted programs were installed. The install windows for these programs would NOT let you decline! Only the accept button was active and there was no close option. Beware if you try to download UniPDF. I used Malwarebytes anti-malware to find and uninstall PUPs.

Just an FYI to Karl (#2):
The reason a program would install in your Users folder instead of either of the program folders (Program Files or Program Files(x86)), is because for whatever reason the program needs to write to its installation folder, and if a program is installed in either of the Program Files folders, it cannot do that without Administrative rights, so it would either prompt you for administrative privilige elevation, would have to be set to run as administrator (in which case you'd get the prompt when you run the program) or it would just throw an error of some kind.
I personally don't like programs that do that without giving me the choice, and since I can't think of a sansible reason a program like this would even need to write to its installation folder, I don't intend to even try it.

I realize this is NOT a review of the program itself, but someone may be wondering about that.

Thanks for the offer.
Tried it on win7/64. Installed quickly.
First thing I discovered: The button for registering the software will not go away after registration.
Tried it only with PDF to DOCX. This is what I discovered
-- it does not have any option to choose the OCR language.
-- Hebrew is not recognized.
-- Images are often interpreted as letters.
-- Spaces between words are often dropped
-- Some of the text is thrown off the page
-- There is so much editing needed after conversion, that it would be easier typing it all manually from the beginning.
After that I restarted my computer (uninstalled). I really do not have time to drag this any further.
I'll let this one pass.

No bad at all: I've just tried to convert a PDF file to Word and the final output turned out to be pretty good indeed, since it was really able to retain the original text and layout pretty well (didn't try with TABLES though).
So my suggestion is to use it and enjoy it as much as you can (after all the GAOTD update limitation should not be an issue here).

THUMBS UP!

BEST FREE ALTERNATIVES

PDF ==> WORD/DOC/TXT/EPUB/HTML/IMAGE/EXCEL/SWF

* UniPDF
http://unipdf.com

* PDFMate PDF Converter
Can easily batch convert any PDF file to Text/Word/EPUB/image/HTML/SWF/PDF, preserving the original layouts, text content, images, vector drawings and hyperlinks.
It's also able to convert scanned PDFs to editable files with built-in OCR (3-page limit), giving users the ability to personalize their output files with very advanced customization settings (extract/ignore specific content and/or extract only images from the original PDF files, make new content without original images, hyperlinks etc...).
Users can even resize their PDF files in A3, A4 and A5 layout and add security protection for opening/editing/copying/printing their converted PDF files, as well as merge multiple PDFs into one.

http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/for_free_pdf_converter

* Ultimate PDF converter
Can convert PDF to DOC/Excel/GIF/JPG (and viceversa) with ease, as well as extract data from almost any type of PDF files!
Just pay attention while installing it, since it's actually an AD supported app.

http://www.ultimatepdfconverter.com

However, if what you need is just to convert PDF documents to Word (DOC, RTF), retaining 100% of original images, tables, charts, graphics, font, size, color, underline, boldness etc..., then just use a superb freeware called "Nemo PDF to Word".
Supports multiple PDFs batch conversion and password-protected PDF files, giving users even the ability to convert partial pages from large PDF files.

http://www.nemopdf.com/pdf-to-word.html

And as for FREE OCR tools, try these:

http://www.ocronline.com (==> Supports over 153 languages)
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/Free-Image-OCR.shtml (==> AD Supported App)
http://www.paperfile.net (==> It uses the powerful Tesseract engine by Google)
http://capture2text.sourceforge.net

Enjoy!! ^_^

@ Guest7 if the promotion of his sight bothers you do try google it makes it pretty easy to avoid going thru his sight.
Or just use this URL to download and try UniPDF
http://www.sharpnight.com/file/unipdf-installer.zip

Any 21st century converter tool, that does not include mobi or epub, is a useless tool.

#10 Aaron Farnsworth.
Thanks for the link, tested my difficult document (see #2) using it and it made the best conversion I have seen, layout was excellent, images were movable and the only errors were where there was no separation between words.
Thanks again for a really good converter.

First, I still have not found a use for something like this. I am always trying to convert documents to PDFs because everyone can open, read, and print them without issues. I recently got a new computer due to my old Vista machine crashing and dying, and lost the best PDF program I ever had, Visagesoft eXpert PDF. I went looking for a replacement and found it for about $98 from the creator. Boy I miss that one!
For all of you that think Ashraf is being lazy or just plugging his website, how ungrateful can you be? He takes the time every day to review every offering here and offer a very comprehensive review with excellent alternative suggestions, so the one day he doesn't do a big review, you slam him? That's just wrong.

OK, vent over.

I use Zamzar all the time, so this software fails to impress me. I can convert various types of files into various other formats and it just takes a minute. No need to install any softwares. You just have to go online for a minute and its done. No worries about the system crashing or any other problems.

http://www.zamzar.com/

Do check it out :)

@Ashraf (post #1)

That is a pretty pathetic attempt at plugging your own site while offering nothing at all about the product in question. No wonder it's being voted as an "unuseful" comment...

Like others here I did try it out and found it a bit buggy and unreliable and not especially great over and above some other tools you can get.

This software is very buggy and offers nothing that free wares don´t do better.

The conversion is just to a image - no OCR. The output is extremely huge compared to other tools with no OCR, like UniPDF.

It is also very buggy:
- asks for a password on a non-protected PDF.
- hangs sometimes for ever
- sometimes fails, but no explanation why
...

For me this tool is worthless.

#5 Steve
No problems editing the text when converted to a RTF document, it most certainly was not an image.

Every time I tried to convert a (text based) PDF file to a DOC file, although there was a pop-up box telling me the conversion was complete, and did I want to view the document, there was no DOC file to be found. The result field in the program's main window said "Error Occurred". This could be why the default is to convert to RTF.

Using the same PDF files, there was no problem in converting to text files. Converting to RTF files sometimes worked OK, but with a document containing images as well as text, only some images appeared in the output file. Strangely enough converting an image based PDF file to RTF worked fine, although of course it was output as a file containing only images. There's no OCR included here. Converting to JPG and HTML files worked without a hitch.

It certainly works better than nearly all of the previous PDF to text giveaways, but it still has its problems.

Seems to convert the PDF to an image when converting to Word or RTF. This is not editable so I don't really see the point of the software.

Seriously... $29 BUCKS!!!
Adobe direct will do it for $1.99 month annually and with that, you get TRUE ADOBE PRODUCT CONVERSION....

It may be free today...but $29 bucks!! C'mon man

No problems getting his program up and running; it opens to a simple interface giving your choice of output type.
Tested it on a PDF file containing two pages, this file has defeated every method of conversion to word I have tried, including converting to an image file and then using an OCR program on it.
The file itself contains large graphics with text under one image and text between two images at the bottom.

Today's download did a surprisingly good job and did it very quickly; it wasn't perfect, some of the text overwriting the image and some lacking spaces between the words.
Interestingly enough all programs that I've tested that did a reasonable job have failed in exactly the same area of the document, having said that most programs I tested made a total hash of it.

I remember from my postgraduate studies that documents written at home and then taken into the university to be printed used to get dreadfully scrambled because of the way the normal.dot template works, my point being how or will this is affect the output when converting to doc files.

One point worth mentioning when I tried to edit my conversion using today's program it was not possible to select the graphic to move it, this did limit my ability to edit the document.

Because of the complexity and diversity of PDF file formats many others need to be tested, having said that it did a good job on a file I know to be difficult to convert, I'll be keeping it in my PDF toolkit.

Installed and registered without problems on a Win 8.1 Pro 64 bit system.

A chinese company without name and address. We had had already software from this company, if I remember right.

A small windows with four keys to convert from .PDF to .xxx opens. You choose your export option, you choose your input file and your output location. That's it.

This small program doesn't have of course OCR capabilites like the excellent Aimersoft PDF converter pro we had had some days ago.

The program installs on my machine in C:\Users\xxxxx\AppData\Roaming\PDF Helper\PDF to X and not in the default program folder.

I would like to write something about the conversion quality, but on my test PDF file, an OCRd book in PDF format, this program does not finish. It says since the last fifteen minutes : converting, please wait, but it doesnnot do anything. I have to close it with the taskmanager.

I tried a simple true PDF file (some ebook pages about wine...) for the second test to the .HTML format. The conversion quality is ... you'll test it better by yourself...

Unsufficiently, in no way comparable with the previous GAOT converter.

Uninstalled via reboot.

Hi folks,

I didn't review PDF to X so I can't say how well or badly it performs. However, in my experience of reviewing dozens of PDF converters, I've found UniPDF (a freeware PDF to Word/HTML/Images converter) very hard to beat.

So go ahead and check out PDF to X if you want; if it turns out to not perform well, you can always get UniPDF. Read http://dottech.org/89142/windows-best-free-pdf-to-word-converter-pdf-to-doc-or-rtf/ for our full review on UniPDF.