Let's face it - in legal services we deal with a lot of PDFs. Until recently, there hasn't been a good, low-cost option for programs that needed to convert and edit their PDF files. (Users can do some editing within Acrobat Pro, but it's limited and may not be available to advocates and staff .)
PDFtoWord.com is a free web tool that does a very good job converting PDFs into editable DOC and RTF files. Users upload their PDFs to the site and receive an email when the conversion is complete. (For me, the email arrived within a few minutes of the upload.) The conversion was impressive: a PDF full of tables retained its formatting well when I opened the DOC file in Word.
Nitro PDF maintains
PDFtoWord.com -- along with other free tools like
PDFHammer and
PDFtoExcel -- and would surely like users to upgrade to their desktop PDF software. If you're working with a large number of PDFs, that program might be worth considering. For the occasional conversion though, the free web app will probably be sufficient.
I also appreciate that the site has a short and clear privacy policy: files are deleted after the conversion and are never looked at or touched by site administrators. Of course, the usual caveat on being extremely careful with sensitive client data on the web still applies.
OCR?
Hi David. Thanks for the tip. Do you know if PDFtoWord.com does OCR? It is difficult to tell from the documentation on their site. Thanks.
-Adam
Test Results
The site came back up shortly after my last comment. I tested a scanned PDF that had no searchable text, and it came back as a word document that had no text, just a picture of my
Then I tested the same file after successfully running it through Adobe Acrobat's OCR function to make the text searchable, and it had the same result.
Finally, I created a test word document and used PDFCreator to convert it to a searchable PDF. This one worked as expected with text rather than an image.
OCR
Adam - I had very similar results. A scanned PDF came back as just an image within the Word document. I only get text for PDFs that were created with a word processor and converted.
It's still a nice little tool, but that's a major limitation.
Site now down