On 2013-11-05 13:59, Lucy Poole wrote:
> Dear all,
> I'm with a student who is needing to access a PDF and edit its format in MS WORD.
> Any reliable, free solutions that do not rely on a subscription to Adobe Acrobat?
The truth is that what will/won't work well utterly depends upon
how the PDF was generated in the first-place.
*sometimes* you can use the program that generated the PDF to
'read it back again' to a sensible editable format, but some
tools can do an ok job to re-gurgitate some form of editable
file anyway, often.
I've had much good experience using reasonably recent versions of
LibreOffice, where the PDF import is now integrated.
You simply run libreoffice (free in both senses) on gnu-linux/mac
/windows/etc. and explicitly 'open' the pdf file (you may need
to show "All Files" to find it in the list, etc.).
Doing this on any 'generic' non-hybrid PDF will create a 'drawing'
document with text-boxes and images overload onto a drawing-canvas.
this may be all your student needs/wants to edit it a bit. But it
entirely depends how the PDF was generated, as to how well this
will work. In any case it may be very useful in combination with
Libreoffice writerto rebuild a Text Document copy-and-paste style
(that you can even save as the word '.doc' format you mentioned).
LibreOffice is also a good choice for *creating* the PDFs in the
first place (or indeed, turning a drawing or text document from
above back into PDF again). If you make sure "hybrid pdf" and also
"tagged pdf" are both 'turned on' in the "Export PDF" dialog, this
makes the document more accessible (works with re-wrapping on zoomed
display) and can also be trivially opened for editing in LibreOffice
again.
Hope that helps, be interested to hear your experiences,
--Simon
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