03-18-2010, 11:22 PM | #1 |
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Best PDF conversion tool.
I have a PDF and I want to either convert it to HTML or DOC. What is the best tool that can do this?
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03-19-2010, 12:39 AM | #2 |
Wizard
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Are they scanned PDFs or text-based?
For the former, search the forums for recommendations on OCR software. For the latter, I don't know of any software that works particularly well, but I'd still probably stick with calibre before paying for anything else. (Calibre will convert to rtf, IIRC, which you can open in a word processor and save as DOC or HTML.) |
03-19-2010, 12:48 AM | #3 |
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Book Designer will also work for text-based PDFs. Then save as html. But it balks at image-based PDFS.
I tend to use Mobipocket Creator, which generally works rather well for text-based PDFs. After you load the file it makes an html version and stores it in "my publications." For image-based PDFs I've invested in ABBYY Finereader 10. It's not cheap but does the job better than the competition, in my opinion. |
03-19-2010, 05:28 AM | #4 |
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It's just a normal book with a cover. So it has an image and it's mainly text.
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03-19-2010, 07:12 AM | #5 |
Reader
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Ah, but if someone has made a scan from a paper copy, then saved to PDF, it will be an image scan. On the other hand, if someone has converted text and a cover-image to PDF then you have the (relatively) easy-to-convert sort.
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03-20-2010, 01:39 PM | #6 |
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BookDesigner generally does a much better job of PDF conversion than does Calibre, in my experience. Plus, you will ALWAYS need to edit the result to clean it up, which you can of course do in BD, but not in Calibre.
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03-20-2010, 02:28 PM | #7 |
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If you don't eant to spring for the full ABBYY Finereader, you can buy the PDF coversion part spearately as PDF Transformer. It work fairly well...
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03-20-2010, 03:40 PM | #8 |
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Along the same line, I have to wonder why ABBYY doesn't give any indication as to the differences/similarities between FineReader and PDF Transformer. It seems, although just a cursory glance, that FineReader may do a better job with PDF to different format conversion. Any words on that, Ralph Sir Edward?
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03-20-2010, 07:45 PM | #9 |
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If price isn't an issue, then go for Adobe Acrobat. It does a good job of conversion from PDF to HTML, without the hassle of editing out headers, footers, and page numbers from the output.
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04-09-2010, 12:02 AM | #10 | |
Man Who Stares at Books
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Try it, you may or may not like it
Quote:
E(A, D) = DT £ [(Yi • Yi)I — YiY? D = DTM(A)D The source is page 2 of http://www.geometrictools.com/Docume...resFitting.pdf It's not the subscripts and superscripts that upset me. FineReader got most of them correct. It is the non-recognition or omission of the math fonts. This makes sampling Transformer, the next program in line, moot. Which leaves me with Acrobat. For non-math/science uses, FR is not too bad. It flows the paragraphs correctly, recognizes italicized text, and identifies headings. Since I won't be evaluating Transformer, I'll leave that to another board member. |
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04-09-2010, 07:05 AM | #11 |
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of those i tried so far, the best is abbyy pdf transformer, specialy for pdfs with images and graphics.
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04-09-2010, 08:37 AM | #12 |
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can i transfer TEXT to PDF?
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04-09-2010, 08:59 AM | #13 |
Wizard
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You can do that with calibre, or with just about any word processor, or about a million other applications. But I think it would help to know a bit more about how you'd like these pdfs files formatted, if at all.
Last edited by frabjous; 04-09-2010 at 09:01 AM. |
04-09-2010, 07:53 PM | #14 | |
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Quote:
I would rank the best 3 converters in terms of output to be used in an ebook reader, or to be used for conversion through Calibre, in this order: 1) Acrobat 2) Nuance 3) Nitro I liked Nuance converter so much I purchased it. The price point is much more palatable than the Adobe's product. Last edited by greenapple; 04-09-2010 at 07:56 PM. |
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04-10-2010, 12:14 AM | #15 |
Man Who Stares at Books
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Nuance had some pretty bad reviews here:
http://download.cnet.com/Nuance-PDF-...-10973909.html When I see the word "crash", I shudder. Bad customer support is also scary. Adobe Acrobat is a bear to use, but there are several books you can buy to master the program. Adobe will be around for a long time. Who knows how long Nuance will be in existence? |
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