Best PDF conversion tool.

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by Fat Abe

Nuance had some pretty bad reviews here:

Adobe will be around for a long time.

Not if Apple gets its way. Sigh.

Has anyone tried the PDF Import Extension for Open Office? I haven't, so I can't vouch for it, but I think it's always best to try the free tools first, before moving on to the expensive ones.

[buecherhans]

I just got an email from Nuance offering a free PDF reader with a free online conversion offering. Converts to Word, Excel, RTF and WordPerfec. I have downloaded the reader and currently testing the online conversion.

Pretty surprising result. I will write a short test report. Should be ready by the weekend. Have to earn some bucks in the meantime.

[buecherhans]

Nuance FREE PDF Reader with free online PDF converter


Test Report (short version)

Software: - Nuance PDF Reader
Company: - Nuance Communications, Inc.
Operating: - System Microsoft Windows (xp, vistas, 7)
see Tech Specs at Nuance.com
Browser needed for online conversion
Price: free
Download http://www.nuance.com/imaging/products/pdf-reader.asp


First of all, please excuse my English, I am not a native speaker.
I have a lot of pdf files on my hard drive that I always wanted to read, but found it to inconvenient to sit hours in front of a screen. Now that I have an eBook reader I need to convert the pdf into a resizable format. For that reason I need to extract the text into a html-file or some format that can be converted to html. Until now I used Mobipocket Creator, which I consider the best free conversion tool. I read that the Nuance converter got some bad reviews and it is just under EUR 100. Acrobat is too expensive for me.
Installation: Simple, you download an exe file, run the file, installation will be automatically (windows-like), run the software.
Conversion: First file a book in pdf.format (German text about 65 pages), very simple and plane, head lines, body text, footer with page numbers, standard fonts. You open the file from the Nuance PDF Reader, there is a buttom for online conversion in the task bar. After you hit the buttom your browser will open at a Nuance site with a from, you need to choose the conversion format, enter an email address and hit send. After a few minutes the converted file is in your mailbox. If you choose Word you will receive a docx-file. Nuance did a pretty good job in letting the converted text look like the original (which I do not care about, since I just want the content for the eBook reader). The footer with two long horizontal lines and the page number in-between was converted to a text box, which is inconvenient, since I will have to delete those manually for some 60 pages. Nuance recognized the page size, paragraphs, bold and italic text and put hard returns at the page breaks, which also have to be removed manually. So far so good. The result was very good, I got an editable Word document that looked almost identical to the original.

The second document (English text, 200+ pages) was a little more complicate, header and footer, graphics, some pages with 2 columns, forms and some artistic fonts in the chapter headlines and bullet lists. Same procedure, open document in the Nuance PDF Reader, looked perfect, I could select and copy any passage of text. So I sent it off to Nuance for conversion waited a few minutes and received the converted file in the mailbox, open the docx with Word. Big surprise.

Text passage - Result
2 column text - perfect
text in Box - perfect with the box frame
web and email addresses (no link in the original) - highlighted blue as a link
Header, footer - as regular text or Word text field (inconvenient to remove)
Bullet list - indented, but no bullets
graphics - in text like the original
forms - look very similar to the original
artistic fonts - Big surprise: missing in the converted text or with typical OCR errors. (????)

Throughout the text a lot of OCR errors like I = 1, m = rn, b <=> h. This really surprised me! Did Nuance use OCR to convert a pdf document? I could just copy and paste the problematic passages and got the right text. Well this was quite disappointing, but still this converted text, while needing some more editing was still usable. Mobipocket Creator did not have any problems with the artistic fonts but also had problems with this text.
On the other hand the Nuance result encouraged me to try another test. Since it appeared that Nuance used OCR I scanned 20 pages of a book with two book pages on one landscape A4 scan. This resulted in a 5 MB pdf-file but text as a bitmap. I send the file via Nuance PDF Reader for online conversion and an editable Word file was returned. A file with all the typical scanning errors, but editable in Word or OpenOffice.

Final result: Conversion by Nuance produces good results and you get a free Optical Character Recognition program online. Perfect for all those who do not have access to OmniPage or FineReader, now you have a free ORC online.

More results with pictures later!

[greenapple]

Excellent review, buecherhans.

The footer with two long horizontal lines and the page number in-between was converted to a text box, which is inconvenient, since I will have to delete those manually for some 60 pages.

With the dedicated Nuance PDF converter you could save a bit of time by cropping the areas you want (ie sans headers/footers) before converting. This will produce a readable text without the bothersome headers, footers, lines etc. I'm not sure if the ability to crop is available in the free Reader program.

[buecherhans]

That's a good idea to crop the text areas to be converted before sending off for conversion. I guess my underlying intention was a comparison with Mobipocket Creator, which strips header and footer (most of the time). You still have to keep in mind that the Nuance conversion is for a totally different purpose than the Mobipocket Creator.

I checked the Nuance Free PDF Reader this morning again and it appears that there is no cropping function in the free version. But that can be achieved with other software.

For me personally, the best result is to have a free OCR online. That is good news for all not having the need to spend some hundred Euros (Dollars) for a dedicated OCR software.

The next question is, if it would be possible to send a pdf-file to Nuance without running their free pdf reader. Since this is done through the web browser it should be possible. That would also give everybody not using Windows a chance to use online OCR software. Since I defected to Cupertino its always a hassle to run the irreplaceable Win software like OmniPage. "You can't always get what you want".

I'll give it a try today.