I am looking for an efficient way to resize and convert large PDF files (I have about 20 computer books which came with their content in PDF on CD typically 10-20MB).

My way at the moment is to use Chief-Win PDF Converter PE for the actual conversion (the only free one I could find that does the whole thing) then Microsoft Word to resize it to 28 and Open Office on a Linux box to save it as PDF.

I find if I try and use a simple Word or RTF conversion I just get 'Invalid page' when I try and open them in the reader.

Is Autoimager and PDFRasterfarian a better option? and how does Bookdesigner fit in?

Cheers

In my opinion, yes. I tried many options to get PDF's to look good on the Reader without success, until I heard about PDFRasterfarian. Not too sure how you'll get it to work for you PC books, by Alex does have a mode in the program to half or quarter the page; i.e., if pages are in the column format, then it will split the page into easily viewable quarter pages. I haven't had the need to do this just yet, but on some of the PDF's that I had of the 8.5x11 variety, PDFR worked wonders. One thing to note, no matter which way you go, unless you have PDF's w/ embedded fonts (if you can select the fonts using AcroRead's text-select function, then you can simply copy/export text to another format) the resultant conversion will have pretty small font. This does not bother me too much, but for many people here who prefer larger fonts, this is a problem.

Secondly, the conversion process will cut the file size any where from 30-70%; e.g., my personal examples: 12.4 to 1.5, 31.9 to 5.7, 8.0 to 3.5, 9.0 to 3.9, 9.7 to 3.8 (all being in MB). Just a small sampling, but some raw data nontheless. I did have one rare occassion where it increased from 3.1 to 8.9MB, not sure why but something to note.

Thanks will give PDFRasterfarian a try. At the moment the only other reliable way I can find is Able2Extract (on a computer without Microsoft Word installed) to RTF then Wordpad (otherwise Invalid page).

Will try HTMLdoc next ..

If you're on a mac, use graphicconverter. I use 166 DPI and it converts quite nicely to image (if they're too big or the wrong aspect ratio).

And there's lots of tools on the mac to grab the text out of a PDF if its single column.

Not sure if this is of any use to you, but I've been using PDF Converter (http://www.nuance.com/pdfconverter/) to convert everything to RTF.

For my needs it's excellent, as far as I can tell, it keeps the original layout and everything.

I've tried that PDF Converter although I favor ABC Amber PDF Converter. (http://www.processtext.com/abcpdf.html)
If the PDF books are composed of text behind the PDF rather than images both products will work very well at extracting the text. If the PDF is a collection of page images then you will need a program that also includes OCR ability like ABBYY Fine Reader or ABBYY PDF Transform.