I realize this may not be the most appropriate place to present this but feel others have issues handling PDF files plus folks on this board are quite knowledgeable, generous and understanding with their help.
I have occaissionlally used Nuance online PDF to Word converter. It did what I neeed at the time but now I need to edit and utilize some of the accumulated data from the converted files. The text is editable but is in paragraph or partial page segments enclosed in what acts like a text or even a photo box which can not be removed. One must copy and paste each small bit of text from each box individually in order to assemble anything editable as a unit in Scrivener or other word processor.
Does anyone have experience with handling this issue or can recommend a better converter?
The price, free, was right at the time but perhaps the time is past.
For free, I don’t know of anything that does a really good job of this. PDF is not the easiest format to work with as it is really more of a hybrid between a picture of a document and a document in the normal sense of the word.
If you’re willing to spend some bucks, the best and to my knowledge only tool that does a good job of this is Adobe Acrobat Pro. This is a PDF-to-RTF export from Acrobat Pro, of the Windows user manual. As you can see, page breaks are lost, but as you can also see it is not only a normal stream of text with rewrapped paragraphs, but more advanced formatting is retained, and even things like enumerated lists are reproduced. Like I say, it costs a bit, but if you do this a lot it will save you many hundreds of dollars per year of time you would have to otherwise spend pulling your hair out with PDF-to-text utilities. Just my two pennies.
[size=80][Moderator note: Moved to Software by Other Folk][/size]
