PDF Converter

[Bidmaron]

I tried to search to see if this had been discussed before, but I could not locate a thread.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a free or fairly low-cost PDF to word converter? I'd like to convert some of my PDFs to Word files and use Visual Basic to convert tables into FG2 table module suitable for direct use in FG2.

[dulux-oz]

Won't Libre Office do it - load up the pdf then save it as a Word doc?

[darrenan]

Doesn't Word have the ability to directly open PDF files?

[JohnD]

Doesn't Word have the ability to directly open PDF files?

If you have one of the newer versions, yes.

[Bidmaron]

Must not be in 2007. Guess it may be time for a 365 subscription maybe

[dulux-oz]

Must not be in 2007. Guess it may be time for a 365 subscription maybe

Nah, go Open Source - I did about 5 years ago and I haven't looked back (but then again I'm sooo tight with a $ its not funny)

[Bidmaron]

Problem dulux is I need to do some scripting to automate, and I am very fluent in Visual Basic. But I suppose I could use libre to convert and word to script

[Mirloc]

Agreed Dulux-Oz, the Open Office, Polaris Office and Libre are all great products.

Now, if you are looking to open and edit there are a number of alternatives to Adobe Acrobat, and have just as good, if not better feature sets. Prices range from FOSS to the couple hundred dollars for a single seat of Acrobat Pro.

Now - and this is the real crux of the issue:
1 - If your original PDF was made by somehow exporting a Word document (for example) any of the products (particularly Libre Office) will allow you to manipulate the document directly and intuitively.
2 - If, however, you scanned a document there is a fairly good chance the document is a picture of the text, not actual text. These kinds of documents cannot be edited easily, and even the cleanest picture won't OCR with 100% accuracy.

[dulux-oz]

2 - If, however, you scanned a document there is a fairly good chance the document is a picture of the text, not actual text. These kinds of documents cannot be edited easily, and even the cleanest picture won't OCR with 100% accuracy.

True, and that's a real issue.

It's also something that an experienced operative like Bidmaron would know - and so I (possibly incorrectly) assumed that this was already taken into account.

[dulux-oz]

Problem dulux is I need to do some scripting to automate, and I am very fluent in Visual Basic. But I suppose I could use libre to convert and word to script

You can script via VB in Libra - one of the reasons I went that way when I got tired of forking out to MS