Another dud PDF converter: this one just converts half a file. It even screwed that up - couldn't handle Word formatting, & delivered blocks of text in 'frames', so you cannot correct easily. A free waste of time. OGT

I will advise people to watch out for the 'bloating' some have mentioned. I converted a 42k pdf to Word, and got a 5.9M doc file.
If I had emailed that to anyone, it would have been embarrassing.

A fix is easy though. In Word, select all, copy to clipboard, open new document and insert it. I did that with the 5.9M file, and got a 42K Word doc as a result.

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 loess 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.

For you, 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.

Thanks again GAOTD.

I tried cracking a pdf with it and it worked. Thanks GAOTD!

Excellent product.! PDFZilla successfully converted a fully encrypted AND protected file into fully editable text. This helped me extract passages for use in a reference document (with acknowledgments) that I could not achieve by page extract method using the fully fledged Acrobat 9.0 Pro edition.
Thanks to GAOTD for this freebie - I would BUY if ever the need arises.!!

I just ran one more test: Conversion to JPEG image.

Results were much better in three of the four cases.

The two OOW files and the FM file with the text at odd angles all came out looking just right.

Unhappily, 'Zilla still didn't know what to do with the dingbat-fonts in the other the FM file.

In a word: Lame.

Installation defaults to C: drive; browse to installation location does not include "Make Folder", so had to stop, make folder by other means, then re-specify. Browse didn't start with directory currently in selector but went back to beginning. Did get it into where I wanted, though, without too much annoyance.

Interface is pretty nice, except for one glaring flaw: Browsing for destination. Again, when there is already something in the selector, a new browse ought to start with that directory; instead, it goes back to the root drive, requiring re-selecting the entire path. A tad annoying when all you want is a sibling directory to the one last used.

Tried it with four test files -- two admittedly tricky. None were made from MS-Word. Two were made with OpenOffice Writer, the same document -- just plain formatted text -- except one had a graphic added. The two tricky ones were made with FrameMaker (a long time ago), originally saved as PS and recently converted to PDF by GhostScript. The GS conversion was pixel-perfect for both of these, and Adobe Reader displays them just the way I intended.

Conversion to DOC:
The two OOW files: It made a difference when, the second time through, I set the "Word XP Compatible" option to "NO". Better, but text was still clustered in boxes. Inconvenient at best...
The two FM files: One of them incorporated text at odd angles. 'Zilla was completely clueless about what to do with that. Other one used dingbat-fonts; again, 'Zilla didn't know what to do.

Conversion to HTML:
Generated HTML that FireFox rejected: "Couldn't recognize C:/ as a protocol". IExp did not have that problem.
The results for the two FM files were similar to the DOC conversion: Didn't handle angled text or dingbat-fonts, otherwise Almost-But-Not-Quite right, correctable with sopme editing by hand.
The big surprise came with the two OOW files: they displayed as complete gibberish; old DOS-style angle-pictures instead of text. VERY odd...

Conversion to text:
I compared against the text conversion done by Adobe Reader. The two OOW files were formatted more accurately by Adobe. The two FM files were not well-handled by either; 'Zilla had a slight edge.

I did not try the other formats.

For fairness' sake, let me add that I've tried other free PDF converters against the "tricky" FM files, and they did not perform any better.

I'm still looking for an "all that" PDF converter.

i have tried pdfzilla on pictures.i.e. converted a bmp to a pdf and then reconverted the same into all the formats of pdfzilla . the pics did not show on it.
yet for people who cannot afford to buy adobe and all people strapped for cash........


Very Good ,

On a scale of 1 to 10. I would rate it as a 7. 3 simply coz they have not bundled a few things in it. and it shows.
but mostly good. simple compact efficient for people who want its use for small things at office like ppts and such. not for large scale ...

I am running WinXP SP3. The program installed fine, registered fine, but the upper right hand buttons did not align well with the cursor when selected. The cursor had to be a little below those buttons to activate the function. The major large buttons on the left were fine. Then closing the program was attempted. It would not close from the 'X' button. The Program Mgr had to be used to close the program. Uninstalled, and reinstalled PDFZilla again, and again, had the same problems with button activation and closing the program. That was enough to remove the program from archive and delete the installation.

We ve fixed the Big DPI screen solution bug

AND

Windows 98 Dll bug


Users can download it here:
http://www.pdfzilla.com/down/pdfzilla.exe

OR

PDFZilla Download Page

Got the OCX error. too bad. Windows 2000.

Program installed quickly and easily on WIN-ME,-SP1. However that as far as I got. When I clicked the icon to open the program to register it, I cant get in due to this error:
"Run time error '453'.
"Can"t find DLL entry point SetLayeredWindowAttributes in user32"

I Googled it and followed suggestions to update my vb6 runtimes, but it still doesnt open, so bye bye program. Looks like it doesnt really run on Windows ME as stated on thier website, as Win ME is unable to create Transparent windows.

Too bad, had been looking for something like this. Will try some of the free ones you guys have shared with us, thank you.

Installed OK but stops working every time I click on the Register link. Pretty much useless.

Installed on XP SP3. Unfortunately, it did not do a great job of conversion. Several files just showed a mixture of code and broken text.

Hmm ... Basic text within a specialized math PDF converts accurately, it seems, but more arcane math formulae and symbols convert very hit-or-miss. What were fully justified pages become flush-left, ragged-right. A .doc conversion and an .rtf conversion of the same .pdf file prove to be absolutely identical files, according to the output of FC /B carried out in a DOS box under Win Vista Ho.Pr. w/ SP1.

That said, setup (as Admin) and entering the reg code (by copy/paste) proved effortless, as did running the app (as Admin, again -- remember, this is under Vista). None of the "misplaced hot spots" reported by other posters afflicted my particular installation.

All told, this may prove useful for converting selected, amenable PDFs -- but certainly it's not the perfect tool for just any PDF, as my first (and thus far only) test PDF showed me.

Thumbs? -- sideways: neither up nor down. Needs improvement.

-- tlvp

crappy s/w takes 25 MB while converting ... am going to uninstall it right now ...

Fubar (# 13),
I appreciate your 'heads up' regarding potential 'DLL Hell' with VB components.

#152, it sounds like the file you tried to convert is one that was produced by a simple "Print To PDF" PDF maker. Each page of a file like that is just an image, and PDFzilla did what it could and converted each "page" to an image and placed it on a document page. That's all this program can do with that. This program is not an OCR (optical character recognition) program.

If you converted a PDF made with Adobe Acrobat or certain other programs, this program would make an editable DOC or RTF file.

For all, if you have any trouble using the DOC output, try the RTF output.

When installing, just insert "\Program Files" into its default install location if you want it to install there. (Change it to C:\Program Files\PDFzilla") It will then install there with no problems. If you're having problems with buttons not being active/clickable where they look like they're clickable, there's something out of sync with the Windows support DLLs on your machine, it's not a direct problem with this program.

This one has a few nicks as noted above but it does what it says and it's a keeper. Thanks, GOTD.

For spiritwolf@91: The free BullZIP PDF Printer (google it) converts to PDF just about anything that has a File | Print menu option to it.
Can also convert to JPG, BMP, EPS (for one-page items), and more.

Program downloaded and installed without a hitch. I converted a 70+ pg booklet from Publisher to a pdf and then from pdf to Word with PDFZilla with great results. One of my managers wanted a working copy that she could edit, but I could not convert from Publisher to Word without losing the formatting. Now, she has her formatting, can edit to her heart's content and everyone is happy. 2 thumbs up!!

I downloaded and registered fine. I was hoping to use this for a specific reason. I wanted to save my Canon cameras user manaul as jpg file that I could load onto a film card and then have the owners manual with me whenever I travel .. if I wanted to review a function, I could just slip in the SD card and review the manual if every page was converted as a jpg file. But when I converetd the manuasl to both jpg and doc format, I got resultant pages with the word "COPY" in capital letters on each seperate page or jpg, making it totally unreadable. I am sure the manual is coptrighted in some way but did this program figure that oput and then insert the word COPY automatically?

anyone else have this difficulty? or suggestions???
thanks in advance,

Toetag man

Hi all!!

What can I say? PDFZilla is a great tool that does its job pretty well and very quickly indeed.

FREEWARE ALTERNATIVES?

Well since most of PC USERS are interested in converting PDF FILES into a DOC WORD FILE format only, another nice application is “FREE PDF TO WORD DOC CONVERTER VERSION 1.1″ :

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/Free-PDF-to-Word-Doc-Converter.shtml


To easily extract images from PDF FILES to TIFF, JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TGA, PBM, PPM, PCX a program called “Some PDF Image Extract 1.5” is in my humble view definetely the best FREEWARE APPLICATION available on the web as it can not only make batch conversion with an user friendly drag and drop files feature but also support ENCRYPTED PDF FILES unlike PDFZilla.

http://www.download.com/Some-PDF-Image-Extract/3000-2079_4-10836441.html


If you want to merge multiple PDF files together to create a single polished PDF file and then edit its content this FREE stunning TOOLS can do this job pretty well for FREE (yes, you got it right...LOL!!):

h ttp://www.pdfhammer.com/
(remove space at beginning)

h ttp://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator
(remove space at beginning)

h ttp://www.download.com/Silkodyssey-PDF-Merge/3000-10743_4-10841061.html?tag=mncol
(remove space at beginning)


But if you wish it’s also possible to perform more complex operations on our PDF FILES before converting them into different file formats using PDFZilla, such as:

- extract, split, or reorder pages of them into a new PDF
- encrypt or decrypt PDF documents
- rotate pages by 90, 180, and 270 degree
- crop pages to change the view or print area, reformat multiple pages into one page with added note lines or change the page position
- add headers or footers in your international language
- add stamp using image or a formatted text in a different language.

How?

With a cool FREE tool called “PDFill PDF Tools Free”:

h ttp://www.download.com/PDFill-PDF-Tools-Free/3000-2075_4-10435051.html

(remove space at beginning)


If you want to extract some text and not the whole content out of your PDF documents and then covert it into a DOC WORD FORMAT then I suggest you using this little GEM called “PDFTextOnline” which doesn't require a software download on your PC as it works directy in your browser:

h ttp://pdftextonline.com/

(remove space at beginning)


Finally another great and easy way to convert any IMAGE, DOC, MUSIC and VIDEO FORMAT (so not just PDF FILES) into whatever else file format without installing any program on your PC is to use FREE ONLINE FILE COVERTER SERVICES such as ZAMZAR and MEDIA CONVERT:

http://www.zamzar.com/

Maximum File Size: 100MB
Download Converted Files link sent via email
Output Format: 53


http://media-convert.com/

Maximum File Size: 150MB
Immediate Download Converted Files
Output Format: 179


The only problem with these kind of applications, including PDFZilla, is that you can’t convert any PDF FILE to any other format if the PDF is encrypted or protected with a password unless you know the password to decrypt it.

Now, since most of PDF files downloadable on the web are protected and encrypted with passwords this means that we won’t be able to convert any PDF file unless we can somehow get the password from his owner or by using special COMMERCIAL PDF PASSWORD RECOVERY SOFTWARE capable of unlocking the PDF ENCRYPTED FILE which of course I cannot mention here for obvious reasons (and not just because all of them I’m aware of are SHAREWARE except one...LOL!!)

Good night from Italy!!

Giovanni

Does it convert to Open Office apps? Does it work on DOS 5? ;)

Program is too sloppy to even consider keeping, much less releasing to the general public. See comments 13, 39, 65 and 132

I am scratching my head. I need a pdf to word converter - this one installed fine and converted the document to a word document. However, I could not edit the word document. Each page was like a big image. Anybody have thoughts on this?

Using Vista Ultimate and Word 2007. Attempted to convert from 5-page PDF to Word .doc Every image was missing from the converted document! (I had selected drawings "yes" and "no" - same problem with both tries).

I will try tomorrow with swf file conversion, and see if it fares any better with that, but otherwise this is not of any use to me.

Had this program in the past and will be upgrading shortly.
WARNING: NOTE: REMEMBER
This is NOT, repeat NOT, again NOT a full OCR program.
You can turn anything into an image file. But this reads only text from fonts, in text boxes. That's to say embedded text only. It can not convert a picture of a page of text you took with your camera and stored as a PDF into text.
It can convert a text file saved as a PDF back to text/doc/et al.
Remember PDF files are similar to zip or rar files. they are a whole bunch of separate files stored as a PDF container with a special layout. Another example is a VOB file on a DVD; that has an MPEG2 file, a PCM audio file, and an SUB subtitle file that all work together based on a script.
If the original source is JPEG or PNG images, you won't be able to get text. A PDF file can take a text file from source A, add in a JPEG2K picture of a book cover, a graph chart from OO Calc, and a CAD graphics design, and with 9+, even a flash video. Using this software Only the text portion of the text file and the Calc spreadsheet will be converted to text, rtf, doc. But it can convert anything into new images.

NOTE TO EBOOK USERS:
Most pay-for ebooks, including the unlocked ones, store the "text" of the book in a mix of images and text files. Check your output.

PS: just in case, this is NOT a full OCR program. ;)

per my earlier post at #14:

IS this program 'properly REGISTERED' on the FIRST GO?

I wish they would indicate this ON the software

Works Beautifully. Running XP SP3 with Office 2007. No issues at all with installation, conversion or opening of files. Opened & converted a 26mb file in around a minute. Thumbs up from me. :)

Had same problem to close the main window. The close "X" on the top right corner does not work. There are two white areas outside the right and bottom sides of the main window (like a white shadow of the window). If you take these area as part of the main window, and move your cursor to the top right corner of the white area, you will see the cursor change shape to indicate a active point. A second later it also shows word "exit". click on it and the window closes. same problem to the "Feed back" and "Website" links, they are actually located on the right of lower white area accordingly. It seems a result of UI changes.

This software DOES support Unicode to display foreign characters, it is a important plus for those who need to convert such files.

For everyone with the OCX installation error.. OCXs (ActiveX Controls) are usually tied to Internet Explorer to function. My assumption is that this version of VSPDFViewerX.ocx relies on IE7. Note that IE7 is only available on XP and above. IE7 is not available on Windows 2000. So, even though both this site and PDFZilla.com claim that Windows 2000 is supported, it appears that some components are not fully supported on 2000 (specifically the VSPDFViewerX.ocx ActiveX Control). Assuming this is the case, then Windows XP installations may also be affected if IE7 is not installed.

If you are on XP and receive this error and do not have IE7 installed, try installing it and see if the error goes away. You'll have to do this pretty fast as the clock is ticking on this GOTD.

Note, it's possible that there is some other issue at work preventing installation of this OCX, but the lack of IE7 being installed seems the obvious choice considering that VSPDFViewerX.ocx is an ActiveX control.

Installed and registered perfectly on XP SP3. Converted LARGE Photoshop book PDF to Word Doc in a matter of a couple of minutes. Text, photos, formatting all fine. This is a keeper. Thanks GAOTD.

#122 Angela

Try to register VSPDFViewer.ocx manually.
Go to Start-run
type cmd - enter
Type
regsvr32 "C:\Program Files\PDFZilla\VSPDFViewer.ocx"
(Between the " is the path to the ocx file,this might be different on your computer)

press enter

i could use a program like this,(XP2) but this one does not install or register, gives me a setup error, failed to connect. please try again later. bugger....

Installed it on Vista 32bit. Did the registration etc. But none of the buttons work and to close the program I had to turn off the computer. Happened twice. Now will uninstall this.

Installed no problem on my Vista and Windows 7 beta. I am loving Windows 7 so far, just wish the beta had EVERYTHING in it..

Converted a page with text and grapics with no real problems that arent easy to fix....

This program did a bad job of converting fine line drawings to Word drawings. Thin smooth lines ended up as thick steppy lines.

This program has some serious problems. I am using Win XP Pro SP3 and when I have the program opened, I have chosen to convert a pdf to html, ok so thats no problem, however when I click on that Green + sign to add a pdf file, the program itself shuts down. So I have chosen to do the drag and drop feature, that worked but then I get all of these html files that are 1kb and they all say the same thing in their source



Page 1









for a pdf management application, this is one of the worse ones I have ever used. I think I will stick with verypdf and Advanced pdf products as they have never failed me. Sorry GAOTD and PDFZilla folks but this gets a thumbs down from me

Perhaps I could use some tips.... It's a nifty looking program, installed well, and I was extrememly hopeful.

But the rendering, on a two page resume of text, was pretty strange. I use only Ariel fonts, but it gave the whole thing in Times Roman. My top level headings, which I give in bold ten point, it shrunk down to 6.5 point, not readable, removing the bold. The second level headings, which I set for bold and italic 10 point, it removed the bold and italic and blew up to 20 point. I don't mind that the text is given in text boxes, but the text boxes lay all over each other, so the text overwrites itself. It replaced the solid bullets with (I am not kidding) circumflexes.

I should say that the source PDF is output from a TeX package, PDFLaTeX, and my copy of word is Word 97, both of which serve my purposes.

I've used other PDF converters before to get to .DOC, so I know they aren't perfect. But I was going to mothball this one ...

However, I see plenty of comments, saying that people here have gotten good results. It really is a nice package and I like to favor GAOTD software vendors.

Perfect working with XP. I tried it with a 76 pages long pdf doc with many pics, photos and diagrams. Converted perfetly into all formats. Great stuff, thanx GAOTD!

When I tried to do a conversion, it appeared to work just fine. However, when I tried to open the converted Word file, I got a "Convert File" box asking me to choose a format to "Convert File From". I'm running Word 2003, and that was not one of my options. I discovered a setting in Word that needed to be changed in order to open the file. If you have a similar problem....
Open Word --> Options --> General --> uncheck "Confirm conversion at open". That solved my problem. Otherwise, program seems to work well.

Installed & registered with no issues. Conversion is fast. This is definitely a useful tool to have.

#16- During setup "Failed to connect" usually happens because it has to connect to this site to verify, & I bet it's your firewall causing the problem. As someone else said, open a browser to the net first, & then make sure your firewall knows it's ok to let setup access the net. If it doesn't work 1st time, do again a time or 2, as sometimes this site is extremely busy. I've had that happen a lot at times I KNOW it's because the site is way busy. Like right after 12 when a new offer comes out. :)

very bad program behavior --
1) it tries to install to C: root of your hard drive. - has the programmer EVER even done any program installations? They should go to "Program Files" NEVER to C:
2) the installation registration fails the first time or two because none of the button locations visible on screen actually even work. Only thing it does is send you to page to pay money. Bad.
3) The buttons on the program do not actually sync up to the hot screen location - they are all off.
4) The application window is not programmed correctly, the window is actually larger than what is drawn on screen, as there are lots of space covered on the right and below the visible 'window'
5) Hard to quit the program, because the "X" close box does NOTHING. Since it is painted onto an area that is not active. The actual close is hidden invisibly off to the right of the drawn screen area.
6) This is a disaster of a program. It is NOT EVEN READY for v 1.0. THIS IS PRE BETA quality... Not release quality.
7) No confidence in this one, will be removing it.

I am sad to see that, yesterday, when I did not get any time to check web, Glary utilities was offered. Probably the only decent program in months and months of gotd junko... I admit, I am pretty disillusioned with giveaway of the day.

Sorry but this one is a thumbs down all the way! Works for some, not for others, converts sometimes but not always, registration issues . And worst thing yet is where it wants to install! No program of any kind is ever going to install to the core of my Windows OS. Especially one of this type. Whats really up with that anyway? Poorly designed code in my book, free or not.
I'm used to one that works all the time with perfect format & layout regardless of the size (# of pages to be converted). I'll stick to that one but will not recommend it due to the cost.

Installed easily on XP SP3. The default address of c:\ is a bit odd, but it was easily changed to c:\Program Files\ where all the other programs live. Tried it on a complicated 160 p report containing text, tables and figures to .doc and it worked pretty well, though some header lines were cut off and the figures were completely screwed up. The text is in text boxes, but I was able to edit them OK. Main use for me will be for copying text and pasting into my own docs, so it will be useful.

Doh! Literally seconds after I posted my previous comment (#117), I seemed to have stumbled on the source of the problem. File->Work Offline was checked in Internet Explorer. I'm lucky to have noticed, because I don't even use IE -- I use Firefox. But I happened to have it open and noticed it. As soon as I unchecked it, Setup.exe for today's giveaway connected.

Go figure.

#16 - try opening IE first. I use FF and had the same problem, but once i opened IE browser (which program specifically goes to at least twice during install), mine ran fine and completed correctly. keep trying. good luck.

Unable to run Setup.exe for today's giveaway (PDFZilla) -- "Failed to connect. Please try again later."

Not a firewall issue -- I don't have the firewall turned on. Nothing wrong with my Internet connection -- I'm able to do anything else. There is only one (administrator) login on my machine, so it's not because I'm not administrator. I don't run ZoneAlarm or any other antivirus or monitoring software. And I doubt it's a transient (e.g., server overload) thing, because I've tried probably 50 times over a couple hours.

I see several people have had this issue in the past, but it doesn't look like it's ever been resolved.

#16 check to see if IE is set for 'work offline' this blocked my activation before even though my default browser is firefox. or look for other setting in IE that might be problem. It's a little scary the power of IE. I couldn't activate pdfzilla in sandboxie on XP sp3. Anyone have any thoughts how to do this??