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Thread: convert pdf to ?

  1. #1
    Senior Member tim's Avatar
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    convert pdf to ?

    Anybody know a decent simple converter for pdf to txt or doc or tab-delineated whatever? Under windows and preferably free. Hope that's not too tall an order.

  2. #2
    Fixer of Broken Things FoBoT's Avatar
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    one time deal or to use all the time?

    i think adobe used to have a web page where you could convert a single pdf
    Use the right tool for the right job!

  3. #3
    Senior Member tim's Avatar
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    Just one time, but if it works well, a few times a year. Download.com has lots of them, but the few I've tried only convert part until you pay $, or look to be spyware.

    I looked at adobe.com and couldn't find a convert page. Does anybody have a favorite tool for converting? I know snobol, maybe I'll just have to write my own. but I'm lazy and was hoping for an easy solution. Or if anyone wants to recommend a cheap one that works well, I'm interested in that too.

  4. #4
    Target Butt IronBits's Avatar
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    http://www.doe.mass.edu/resources/pdf.html
    http://www.pdf-to-html.com/products.html
    http://www.atf.treas.gov/pdfcon.htm
    http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_simple_form.html

    or http://access.adobe.com/perl/convertPDF.pl?url=http://yourURLhere.com/filename.pdf

  5. #5
    Not here rsbriggs's Avatar
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    I looked at adobe.com and couldn't find a convert page. Does anybody have a favorite tool for converting? I know snobol, maybe I'll just have to write my own. but I'm lazy and was hoping for an easy solution.
    I didn't realize that SNOBOL was still alive. Last reference I saw to that language was nearly 25 years ago, and I certainly don't recall it being very good at manipulating binary data... Mostly what I remember is that whitespace isn't whitespace - the space character is the string concatenation operator, and that things go downhill very quickly from there...

    Ummm. Most people don't convert from PDF to something else, they start with the something else, and generate a PDF file from it. They (Adobe) have things set up so that you can't, in general, manipulate a PDF file unless you buy the tools from Adobe to do so... This is the sort of thing that they (Adobe) are exactly trying to prevent - taking a PDF file that you didn't generate, "down-converting" it to some other format, and then modifying it....
    FreeDC Mercenary


  6. #6
    Senior Member tim's Avatar
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    Thanks guys. The online conversion thing didn't give me much useful, the downloadable converter program was too big for my hard drive. This machine I'm using is (believe it or not) a cyrix 150 with a 2 gig hd. It's almost full. It gets done what has to be done, at least while I'm away from my fast machines.

    In my searches, I did see in the legal fine print of one of the programs I tried, that it uses some software from foolabs.com under the gpl license. So I got the original stuff from there, pdftotex.exe, and it did the trick. I'm a happy camper now.

    BTW, Snobol is strictly text processing. I hadn't realized until I looked at the raw pdf that it was binary. I thought pdf was a markup system like html. But for string processing, Snobol rules (and its cousins spitbol and lisp). Its command line and syntax was mind-bending to learn, but prepared me well for what little Linux scripting I have picked up. It's great for making concordances, indexes, word lists and for studying how written language works.

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