One reason I dislike the PDF format intensely is because it is so difficult to convert it to another format. Most PDF tools that advertise a 1:1 document conversion usually fail as soon as the document in question is somewhat more complex. PdfGrabber 2.0 (http://www.pixelplanet.de/english/products/pdfgrabber/) is new on the market and claims to perfectly convert PDF documents into various other formats, including Excel, RTF and XML. There is a standard (68,10 EUR) and a professional (102,59 EUR) version available; the latter allows you to also convert multi-column PDF content.

You can download the trial (http://www.pixelplanet.de/english/download/pdfgrabber2.html) which randomly inserts the letter "X" into exported documents.

[via Golem.de (http://www.golem.de/0504/37719.html)]

This is great but why is this PDF crap so friggin' expensive?! Everything "PDF" is so insanely expensive. I am a technical writer and the question I always get is "Do you have Acrobat Professional?" Well, yea I have it but that doesn't mean I bought it. I"d like to have a registered copy but the whole PDF mess is getting messier. Everyone and his dead aunt HATES Acrobat 7 and I can't blame them. And the product keeps getting more expensive.

Adobe is worried Microsoft will soon incorporate PDF output as a native output format in Microsoft Office. Well, I guess I welcome that because Adobe is screwing up here. PDF should be cheaper and less invasive, not the opposite!

OpenOffice.org can output to pdf, and it makes a pretty good job of it too. So you can convert all your Word docs, spreadsheets, presentations, web pages etc for free.

I agree with your post though - I loathe pdf format. Trying to convert it to html using Adobe's tools is laughable, especially the Palm version. Do they really think that converting every page of a 500 page file to a jpeg is acceptable?

Edit: PDAConverter (http://www.jakewalk.de/palm/pdaconverter_e.html) is an excellent tool for converting PDFs to text/html/plucker. The output from a pdf is still a bit messy, but at least you've got *text* output to work with.