@ 57 nuclearwerewolf. Funny you have a completely different experience with ABBY & PDFZilla as mine

I've used my old 1.0 version of ABBY on several occasions and it was always at least 95% satisfactory. You see, I do translations "in situ" so I'm able to preserve the original layout of texts for publication. This is impossible with the Word document obtained from PDFZilla as I explained in my n° 46 comment.

So I tried to replace this abominable Simsun with Times New Roman. And , bingo, the columns are, this time, normally handled and the text perfectly readable, except for those few parts that now overlapped with pictures (not the text that was in pictures in the original PDF file).

I now noticed that the End of line marks were all preceded with a blank space. So, I thought a simple replace would do the job. No way! The only "positive" part is that instead of having a text frame for each line in a column, I now have a frame per column which makes text easier to edit. But, even if the columns are still recognizable, they now show heave overlapping that makes the whole unreadable and, of course, totally uneditable, while, as explained, editing is my basic purpose...
By the way, my previous comment also triggered a Bad Gateway reaction but got through anyway...

After initially getting the 502 Gateway error,was finally able to install on a XP sp3.

Conversion PDF to Word: Text position maintained but with change of font(From Calibri to SimSun)but Times New Roman was retained. The Images in the original pdf have also rotated/flipped horizontally(giving the impression that you are viewing them from behind).An extra blank page which isnt in the original PDF also appears.

Conversion to Images and Text were average.

But for Conversion to Word, I believe it does a poorer job than PDF Tiger.PDFZilla gives each line its own text box-very cumbersome

For professionally editing native pdf documents,Infix PDF Editor(commercial)works perfectly for me(its a 20mb file with a negligible CPU Signature)or the more bloated(300mb)ABBYY Finereader(Trial and Commercial).

Not good for conversion in word. Not to waste time download.

Ran fine on Windows 7 x64
Conversion was better than expected in many cases, in comparison to programs like ABBYY PDF Transformer. I will keep it but, look forward to a program that can truly convert to word, without flaws and weird characters.

http://my.jetscreenshot.com/demo/20100104-okuc-180kb
Here is an image created with:AnyBizSoft Pdf to Html from GAOTD.Is perfect.

Downloaded, installed, registered and runs smoothly on WinXP SP3.

After registering PDFZilla, it say I've the Standard Version. Okay, that's fine with me, but on the default installs folder C:\Program Files\PDFZilla there's a zillapro.exe file.

I'm wondering if anyone could tell what's that exe. file? If I clicks on it will it make PDFZilla become a Pro version?

Thank you in advance for answering my curiosity.

@#26, tom tac:

prior PDFZilla giveaway comment from #49, Heinz, lists a changlog from Softpedia...

current Softpedia page:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/PDFZilla.shtml

seems to only show "Windows 7 now supported", but Heinz found a larger changelog than is now listed for past releases...

also links to Softpedia review, but old version (1.0.8)...there is a contact email to request a review...maybe Softpedia can get the answers you are looking for?...

I could not install the program from GOTD (kept getting an error message) so I cheated and installed it from : http://www.pdfzilla.com/ and used the reg key from GOTD.

I've had this program before it's not the greatest but it does work.
I convert to text and then clean it up then using note-tab Pro I convert it to HTML. Why because I hate PDF and word they bloat the doc with useless formatting repetition.

The most glaring problem I found was that there was far too many instances where the coverted text overlapped - the end of one sentance overlapped significantly with the start of the next sentance, rendering large portions of the document unreadable. This is a large enough problem with the documents I tested to make this software unusable for me. The PDF documents I tested with were Canon printer user and service manuals. Pictures were handled properly, but the text issue was the big deal-breaker for me.

I have Windows 7 (64-bit) it installed, but as many other people have said, it converts everything into word text boxes and the formatting, font and placements are often wrong.

I'd say do not install this, I wish I had read more of these reviews before I installed it.

Can anyone recommend a PDF to Word converter, preferably freeware please, that retains most of the layout and is easy to edit afterwards.

This program works okay on some pdfs, not on others. Pretty much like most of the other converters I've tried. The best I've found so far is the OpenOffice.org version 3 plugin from the Sun website "sun-pdfimport.oxt". Open the "Tools" menu from the main screen and select "Extension Manager". Import the file by clicking the "Add" button at the bottom.

Once it's installed, you can simply drag-and-drop a pdf file to the main menu. OpenOffice.org will open it in "Draw". It puts each line in a box like this program too, but it all looks almost exactly like the original file (at least in my own experience).

Anyway, I thought some people here might find this info helpful.

I'm keeping the PDFZilla program, too. It makes it easy to convert pdfs to plain text and such when that is needed.

Installer defaulted to installing into c:\pdfzilla. That might have been acceptable in the days of Windows95, but not anymore!

The front end is very flashy, with huge buttons and is very simple to use with no ability to change anything but the very basic of settings.

Tried a single page pdf and converted it to Word. It changed all the different fonts to 'SimSun' font, lost all the formatting and if I wanted to create a final word document that looked like the pdf, by the time I had done all the editing, I would have done it quicker manually by simply copying and pasting the text and images myself.

Good job I paid zip for this. Otherwise I would have asked for my money back.

bzzzzd - it's gone

It uses text boxes to poorly place the text. Makes the DOC basically uneditable. Font selection is flakey, but I could live with that if text was extracted well. I also had the problem mentioned in the earlier comment about ligatures. Sometimes it dropped dropped them, sometimes not, sometimes it created misspellings, sometimes it inserted spaces at random.

I also tried the conversion to HTML. Almost usable but ultimately also not.

Given the generated misspellings I couldn't recommend it for anything other than casual personal use.

I've tried another converter, Able2PDF, which works much better, no generated errors. Particularly it does NOT create text boxes. It also has a few issues, but none I consider "fatal".

Great program. Not sure how it rates on some of its other conversions but it easily converted an 8 page pdf newsletter into jpg images for me, which is exactly what I need!

Thumbs up and thank you GOTD and PDFZilla.com

#41; thanks for that little tidbit. I've been having trouble too; I'm getting the dreaded "502 Gateway error" using IE7 but was able to download using Firefox, but upon opening it tells me no files found. I waited a few hours and tried again, with the same results. I went to their website, put in the key from the readme.txt file and it worked. XP SP3.

@ 16 József . I think you are being a bit optimistic here: The first thing the .exe file does, when launched, is connect to the internet to check the availability, i.e. the proper registration with GAOTD. Only after you installed the program, you are given the opportunity to enter your registration code. And this happens through the author's web page...
Anyway, installation was a piece of cake.

I then tried PDFZilla on a PDF brochure I had converted before, using an old version (2004) of ABBYY PDF Transformer 1.0 which I got for free (GAOTD?) some time ago. This one can be reinstalled, but, of course you do not get any updates

The good: PDFZilla was extremely fast on the job, but this 3 MB PDF grew to 30 MB! And even if it's readable (layout is mostly respected except for text that appears in pictures: this is sent below the picture).

The bad: the font that looks like Times New Roman in the original is recognized as a fairly ugly "Simsun" font, whatever that may be.

The worse: columns are respected, but every line "bleeds" in the column next to it. Titles who exceed 1 line also see the end lost in the underlying text or picture.

I haven't tried any editing yet, but this is almost impossible since every line in every column ends with an End of line character (paragraph mark).

Maybe I'll try some editing, like changing this font, but I'm afraid this Eol feature, which is exactly the same as the genuine one, makes it fairly impossible to do a search and replace to get rid of it...

Any suggestions?

I try:Some Pdf to Word converter and Some Pdf to Html converter and it wmake a good conversion(much better than Pdf Zilla).All this are free.Source for inspiration:www.techsupportalert.com

The registration key wasn't working until i downloaded it from the real site and used giveawayoftheday's registration key, finally worked!!!

Again, I raise same question. Does this software work right on 64 bit systems?
I find nothing on this site, nor on developers that would answer this question. So, I assume the answer must be no.
Again, I wish 64 bit would be addressed by developers.

This product does a great job on PDFs that are primarily images to jpg format (such as cross-stitch patterns). The results are far larger than the original PDF but they look good.

It did a very poor job at converting documents to Word or RTF. The test cases (some of which included graphics), failed to convert the graphics and also failed in the formatting (such as bolding) and had text overlapping in many cases.

I'll keep it for now in the hopes that it does better on other documents and for the PDF to JPG conversion (multiple page documents supported) but It's not as good a converter as others I've seen.

FYI - I'm running Vista32 Ultimate SP2

On conversion collides columns in Times New Roman. Changed the font to Arial and the document looked fine. Don't like the individual frame around each sentence though. A keeper until i can get something more accurate. Overpriced at $30 tho. Thx GAOTD.

Tries to retain the format on conversion to Word, but doesn't do it entirely successfully. I have a lot of journal articles in pdf which i edit in Word, but this program 'collides' columns on conversion. Don't like it, as not quite what i need. But thx GOTD.

I think that AnyBizSoft Pdf to Word or Pdf to Html is better than Pdf Zilla at this kind of conversions.

Hello I am disagree with afrinux. This software poor as slum dawg. Installation problems, and contrary to afrinux the conversions are very slow with lots of mistakes, be it from a text based pdf or otherwise. Is not good. Flash not work. Try to uninstall leaves lotsa ghosts. I am not liking this program and advise you are not liking neither. Yes.

Surprisingly, it identifies and converts Hebrew letters.

Unfortunately it prints then from left-to-right. And as has been stated, it leaves every single line as an individual frame. It would take an enormous amount of work to make this into a Word document.

I don't think I'll be using this, but thanks for the opportunity.

This version was given away a while ago. However, it is VERY good so if you haven't got it, GET IT!

I am using Vista Home version, and I tried two times to install PDFZilla, and both times it couldn't register, though it says successfully registered if I try. But when trying to convert a PDF file to some other format, it brings up an info box saying that the product is not registered. I'm not trying any software by this company again. Totally crap.

Thanks KAS, Ian, red, LuvyDoveyBabe for your responses. It is 1.27 & I've downloaded it. Not much different to the previous version from GAOTD - not perfect but not bad & worth downloading for free. Thanks PDFZilla.com & GAOTD.

Installed without problems on Vista 32 Ultimate. Did good job converting PDF to JPG. Looking under 'Properties' of EXE file: Version is 1.2.0.7

Just downloaded this software, PDFZilla. Its asking me for a registration code. Anyone else have this problem?

Must to rectify:pdf to txt work good for english but not for romanian(eat letters).Also Simpo pdf to text make corect conversion for english and romanian in the same time.I don't know if is better for other languages.Also Simpo is very fast and free.

First ...

... If anyone can find a set of Release Notes, I would be grateful to know it. The reasons will be obvious below.

M A I N L Y
===========

I use PDFZilla to convert PDF to Word. The way I do it is:

1) Download the 1.2 setup and run it.

2) Stick in the 1.0 binaries and use those.

When I convert to Word, then I have a few steps to clean up the output:

@) I eliminate all bold and italic in the document, then I convert.
a) Open in Word. (It is always in times roman and a small size.) Set WHOLE doc to Tahoma 12. (Last page sets to 13.5 for some reason.)
b) Change some of the "9"s into "fi" and "8"s into "ff".
c) Change some commas into quotes. i.e., "vendor,s" into "vendor's".
d) Move some left justified text to right justified.
e) Since the file size is usually quite bloated, copy whole new doc to a new word doc and resave. This usually pulls doc size down to normal. (Like from 6 megs to 50 kilo.)

So ... you get the idea? Not a perfect conversion, quirky but workable. But only if I use PDFZilla 1.0 instead of PDFZilla 1.2 .

It used to be that bold and italic would affect the output's font size. Don't know if that is true.

Here is an example of quirky output I would get. I sent the following letter to support@pdfzilla.com last spring or summer...


I am saddened by two important changes. Not sure why they did it.

The ONLY thing I use this for is converting my resume’s PDF to Word.

(1) Spaces disappear. I run the pdf through PDFZilla 1.0, and …

All the text comes out like this.

Then if I run the same pdf through PDFZilla 1.2

Allthetextcomesoutlikethis.

(2) The ff and fi ligatures have changed, for the worse. I wrote to them about it last spring, they wrote back saying “Thanks, we’ll keep trying to improve our product!” And the following happened.

When the line “I reviewed the different specifications” is run through PDFZilla 1.0, it comes out as …

I reviewed the di8erent speci9cations

I do a search on 8 and 9 and fix them.

Then if I run the same line through PDFZilla 1.2, it comes out as …

Ireviewedthedierentspecications

… so the ligatures aren’t turning into digits, they are disappearing.

Someone pointed out that PDFZilla is mostly just a GUI front end for freeware converters found in the PDFZilla tree. I could find most of them, but the 1.0’s pdf to word converter I did not find. I was trying to find out which converter it was and what they changed.


I gather that the heart of its conversion to word is a simple loop of (get a character)-(mask it and strip off bits)-(output that)-(repeat).

i) One consequence is that extended characters like international quotes and ligatures and such get mapped to ASCII's control characters, and that used to mask and strip and come out as things like digit 8 and digit 9 (but now don't come out at all).

ii) A second is ... SPACES . I gather that the old strategy for PDF conversion was to include them, so "ab c" would stream out as "a", "b", "space", "cc". But more recent converters seem to use space as a postioning command, so "ab c" comes out now as "a, 0 move" "b, big move" "c, 0 move" and after masking and stripping looks like "abc" and the spaces have disappeared.


Here is what I thought I posted the last time PDFZilla was here (version 1.2, back in July).


I can recommend this, but with a few caveats. This is because I use a somewhat nonstandard setup, and so PDFZilla's quirks have had to be dealt with. However, I have worked around them, and will be using it a lot for this need.

(That said, then, I'll be sending these comments to PDFZilla.com as well, with a big thank you to them and to GAOTD.)

1) I have a PDF document that I generate from TeX, or more specifically, LaTeX. I want to make a DOC that I view with Word 97.

This causes problems, and I think it is because both the TeX and the old Word are not what PDFZilla's creators programmed against. Okay, that happens. I decided to work with it.

2) PDFZilla, in this case, takes a good looking PDF, and makes a DOC, but the result is not automatically good. The biggest problem seems to be the bold and italic attributes -- PDFZilla seems to decide they are related to size. So my resulting DOC file has the 12 point headings either shrunk to 6.5 point, or blown up to 20.5 point.

As it happens, though, I can do without bold and italic in the DOC. I adjusted my code so I can use them elsewhere, but for the DOC, I don't use them, and it made the results look much much better.

3. There are some other minor annoyances, but I found them easier to live with. The "ff" and "fi" ligatures, PDFZilla converted to the digits "8" and "9", respectively. Some apostrophes were converted to cedillas. That sort of thing. This takes less than a minute to tweak up.

So I have succeeded in getting what I want. I first generate a temporary PDF, one from which PDFZilla reliably produces my good looking DOC, and I quickly tweak it. Then I rerun my app and make the good looking, permanent PDF that I want to keep.

Just keep in mind that TeX documents, or old Word software, may need extra care, and certainly proofread any DOC that has to be in good condition.


I did in fact send this to support@pdfzilla.com and they wrote back with a "thanks!" one liner. (Since 'that' letter was a 'good product' email, I suppose 'thanks' is a good answer, but I got no response at all to my earlier 'here is my problem' email.

* * * * *

My bottom line is: It is a good looking front end, but the backend is quirky. I don't see the development team really doing anything, so this seems to be close to abandonware in terms of support.

The support, the online "FAQ" and all that seem to have been written and run by the sales team. There is no wiki for problems and no technical answers to technical questions.

I would love the release notes, so I could see if anything at all was done about

1) spaces
2) bold and italic
3) ligatures

but I won't download and try just yet. I do not want to mess up the hacked installation I described above, so I may try it later today when I have more time.

Peace, God's blessings.

I believe pdfzilla is worth the download, thanks GAOTD and pdfzilla.com.

Here are my findings :

Tested a 21 pages pdf manual, single column, many pictures.

->> HTML : horrible, one long single html page, with an ugly font, and pictures not displayed. When you look at the code, you find images urls are cut. In the image directory they are all there (jpg), but most of them upside down !

->> Doc : almost good, text and pictures are there, but with an ugly font (fuzzy right alignment)and most pictures upside down.
But if you select all text and convert f.i. to arial or calibri, right alignments (end of lines) are almost restored. Then you have to manually rotate upside up each picture.
File size is impressive :

Original pdf = 446 ko >> Converted Doc = 15 Mo (!!) >> Saved as Docx = 510 ko (14% above original pdf)

->> SWF : beautifull and light : 373ko ( - 17%). Text and images appear as in the original. My only con is there are no pauses between pages, it is a single sequence swf movie : you have to stop/restart your player at each page (instead of just one click for next page).

Thus, I foresee some instances where pdfzilla, imperfect as it is, could still be a usefull tool for me.

My score ? Eeee..., let's give 6.8/10 :)
(until you tell me a brilliant free competitor)

Happy new year from France to all !

#11 you're right. I withdraw my initial enthusiasm for this product (comment #7). It turns out that the .doc files it produces are unusable for any sort of editing or reformatting. Looks like I'll have to go back to feeding documents back into an OCR. It's by no means a perfect solution, but it's more reliable and faster and produces more usable content than this software.

I DL and installed with no problem.
the one thing that you should know is on first use only 50% of pdf will be converted. after that it says do you want to register, and then click yes and enter key in readme.
after that I converted same pdf again that was 61 pages of plain text in script format, and it converted perfectly into word .
some fanfiction is done in pdf and now I can convert them to word which is easier to navigate.
filesize went from 189 kb to 583 kb for word doc. which isnt a big deal for files that are small.
seems like a ok program if you have a use for it. cant say about pdf that has images.
some manuals are in pdf I might try converting those later.

The latest version 1.2.7 supports windows 7 .

Pros:
* Downloaded, installed, activated, run smoothly on WinXP SP3
* Was able to convert pdf files to word and swf
* Processing speed was very fast

Cons:
* Sometimes, some part of the doc are not readable(problem can be on the original pdf file)

Conclusion:
Viewing your pdf format ebooks in flash can be cool.
Pick this software, you can always uninstalled it later.

PDFZilla installs easily on Windows XP and features a clean, goodlooking, easy to use GUI. But of course, what matters most is the quality of the output.

Since I've recently bought several textbooks in PDF format, which aren't particularly easy to read in either of my PDF readers, Foxit and Sumatra, I was curious to see what PDFZilla could do with them. Incidentally PDFZilla is the first PDF conversion tool I've ever installed. Previously I've only used online converters, which I've found to be completely ropey, so my expectations here weren't very high.

So to test PDFZilla, I converted two large textbooks from PDF to each of several formats : Word, PDF and JPG.

My first textbook converted cleanly - in the visual sense - from PDF to Word. It had obviously been created from a set of images, so the output was entirely image-based. The resulting document was extremely bloated - four times the size of the PDF! - and MS Word took an eternity to read it in and display it. However I was then able to save it again using Word, and ended up with a good looking document about the same size as the original PDF, which loads quickly into Word. Of course, it's still completely uneditable, but it's much easier for me to read and navigate. For exactly the same reasons, this textbook converted nicely to JPG, but atrociously to HTML.

My second textbook did not produce anything useful in Word format. PDFZilla managed to extract actual text from the PDF, but for some strange reason it was unable to detect any spaces between the words, so the output is pretty well unreadable. This textbook also produced horrible HTML, but it did generate a tidy set of JPGs which I can browse and read easily in an image editor.

My verdict: don't expect the HTML output to be remotely readable, and don't expect to create editable, text-based Word documents. If however like me you're happy merely to convert your enormous PDF ebooks into alternative formats, just to make them a fraction easier to read and navigate, and you don't mind spending a bit of time re-processing the output so it's less bloated, then you might find PDFZilla useful.

PDFZilla is a keeper for me. I wouldn't pay more than $10 for it, but it's a nice freebie.

Is there any (version) difference compared to the previous giveaway of this software?

Hi.,This is a great software. If you unzip the file downloaded from this site you will find a registration code. With this code you are able to made registration of original exe.file downloaded from developer site. So in this case you can reinstall your software any time you need.
Enjoy !

One of the better PDF to Tiff Convertors..
Some are just plain worthless. I will keep this one. Cheers

@1 The app says 1.2 Standard Edition so I don't know if it's the version you're referring to.

After receiving bad gateway errors with d/l link and Mirror link I was finally able to d/l with IE (yuck!). The app is very simple and easy to use. It does what it says. For people that use OpenOffice.org (instead of MS Office) the "Convert to Word" function will convert to the .odt format for you.
Also, after converting not all the format is retained so I assume that is why they leave it editable. I did notice when converting to RTF format it used bullets on what I converted, which I didn't mind.

It converts very fast and is very useful if you have the need to convert PDF.

Hello
I am a user of this software long ago.
Do exactly what promises.
I recommend.

Installation: It will install in the root (C:>) unless you change target manually during installation.
As I wanted to compare speed and quality in this program with Adobe, I used the same pdf source file and tested the ability to make a Word file and an txt-file. (PDFZilla can only convert to the "old" Word format *.doc - not to *.docx.)
PFDZilla worked much faster - only about one second for converting four pdf pages to a Word file. Unfortunately, the Word file turns out with just one blank page. Likewise, the program failed to produce a txt-file on my XP SP3 - even after many experiments. Adobe works fine, tho ;)

Conversion to Word (.doc, .rtf): It converts each line to separate paragraf, embedded in separate frame, that means the documents almost can't be edited without breaking its structure. So by coversion you get the Word document which looks similar to the PDF original, but it is very difficult to change. If a human typist would create such a document, he/she would immediately loose his job, IMHO.

Conversion to HTML: similar problem - each line is coverted to separate div, so again: the document may look similar to the original but is usless, if you need to change it.

#1, all it says is 1.2 standard.

disappointed. installed fine on Win7 (32), tried a few conversions to rtf, doc and html, non of them were any good. None of the text was converted. only figures and some of them were also distorted.
:-(

Yes 1.2.7 but don't waste time downloading as output to Word is useless as formatting and fonts are wrong.

Amazing.
Apart from a slew of 502 Bad Gateway errors when I tried to download it (hit often enough and it'll eventually download) this software actually seems to do what it says on the tin!