Quote:
Originally Posted by calum.kane
It depends on which version of office you are using. MS Office 2007 has a full utility for converting and editing PDF files.
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I had not realized that recent versions of MS Word would directly read/convert PDF files. Thank you for pointing this out. I just tried loading a few random PDF files into MS Word 2016 (Office 365 v16) and it did an
amazingly good job. I tried
scanned documents (no OCR layer) with inset graphics, and it correctly found and OCR'd the text, using the correct font, and also inset the graphics perfectly within the text. A two-column scientific paper (computer generated, not scanned) was converted perfectly into a Word file--all of the text in the correct font and with all of the figures placed perfectly. Even when I
scanned that same 2-column article into a bitmapped PDF file with no OCR layer and used Word to open that bitmapped version, it still correctly rendered the text (using OCR) into two columns and inset the figures. Microsoft has clearly put a lot of effort into turning PDFs into Word documents. I had no idea.
This will be my number one recommendation for dealing with PDFs from this point forward.
Edit: I've added some examples. The scanned conversion isn't as good as the conversion of the computer-generated PDF (native.pdf), but it's still very good considering the intelligence that had to go into something like that. Sorry I used a zip file for the word files. The forum attachment system would not let me attach a .docx file. The open_office_format.zip file contains the Word files saved in the .odt format.