PdfGrabber 2.0 exporting PDF content

[Alexander Turcic]

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 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 which randomly inserts the letter "X" into exported documents.

[via Golem.de]

[clicclic]

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!

[flashman]

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.