Logos 4 PBB: What is the Best PDF to Word converter.

Using the free PDF to Word converter off of CNET. It is working ok but am seeing random spaces inserted into text.

BTW: PBB is Great I have converted several of my PDF just to get them into Logos. Can hardly wait until the all Thomas Black's Still Truth collection added.

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Brother Mark

Peter,

I personally use Calibri to convert from PDF to RTF (Rich Text Format) which MS Word reads, preserves formatting, etc; and may then be saved in .docx format. I've also noticed several forum posts from other L4 PBB users that also recommend it. Its free and you can find it at http://calibre-ebook.com

Bohuslav Wojnar

I don't know about any free converter that would really do a good job with pdf. The best free one I found is Calibre. The best of all (including the paid ones) IMHO is Adobe Acrobat and Nitro. Nitro has also a free cloud-based conversion tool.

steve clark

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/278232#Comment_278232

Be aware that conversion using Calibre from PDF to RTF does not handle Tables, Textboxes, & Lines well in its conversion.

This is the first page of my PDF (it was built in Word using Textboxes and lines; which Logos PB does not recognize). i was hoping that Calibre would have converted it to an image.

After Calibre converted it to RTF this is what shows up in Word.

i had similar experience when a PDF contained a simple table with text in each cell.

JT (alabama24)

What is the Best PDF to Word converter?

I have been using Adobe Acrobat [not the free reader] and have been very pleased.

Rich DeRuiter

I recently downloaded a denominational study committee report in PDF, selected all the text (CTRL-A) and copy/pasted into a new Word document. It worked great.

All that was left to do was to tag the headings.

However:

I tried this with another document (made with Cute PDF) and got a bunch of junk mixed in with the text.

I imagine a PDF > Word converter will probably also give mixed results, depending on the formatting of the PDF itself.

Bill Cook

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/278287#Comment_278287

It seems to depend on a great many undefinable factors. I have tried Nitro with mixed results... I have tried Nemo... really seems to hose the graphics or tables. I have tried online solutions...mixed results.

And, I have tried Acrobat full version - version X. It does OK, but, ignores italicized text and some other minor things - but does the best so far.

Honestly, I have had better luck printing the pdf, scanning, and then doing OCR with OneNote into Word and then digging through. I know this would be a pain on large 'books', but there doesn't seem to be a quick and clean way to do it, to me, so far...

Brother Mark

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/278311#Comment_278311

It seems to depend on a great many undefinable factors.

sure does Bill.... As Smiley stated earlier, tables seem to be a serious sticking point for the free conversion program. Lots of expensive programs promise error free 100% conversion... but fail on one thing or another, even the father of PDF file format isn't perfect (Bill, you use Adobe X and I have Adobe 9 with similar results to yours).

For folks that are frustrated by both the high price of commercial solutions that aren't perfect, and free utilities that are likely far below 100%, I've looked at the demo of a relatively inexpensive commercial app that is about as good in my estimation as Adobe itself. Might want to take a look, and see what you think.

Robert M. Warren

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/278287#Comment_278287

report in PDF, selected all the text (CTRL-A) and copy/pasted into a new Word document. It worked great.

Hi Richard:

I have tried this, also, but with mixed results. Sometimes it works OK, but many times paragraph breaks are at the end of each line (line on screen). I haven't taken one of these all the way through PB compiling, but i suspect those paragraph breaks will cause mischief.

All:

I've tried the free PDF-->Word converters, but they usually use a bunch of text boxes to accomplish the conversion and they also put paragraph breaks at the end of each line on the screen. I'm not sure what the PB compiler will do with those, so i haven't spent any time trying to compile them.

I have tried Calibre, but with disappointing results (weird indents, etc.). I'm fairly sure this is because I haven't taken the time to get the settings right.

One program I have success with is Mobipocket Creator, which is a free program from Amazon's Kindle-predecessor company. I am familiar with it already, since I have been using it for 2-3 years making public domain Kindle books. As part of the process of making the .prc file for the Kindle, it makes an intermediate HTML file (usually found in My Documents\My Publications folder) , which usually looks good. I can then either open up the HTML in Word (sometimes it can't open them because of some odd setting in the file), or open it in a browser, select, copy and paste into Word.

The headings that start chapters are usually preserved in some fairly unique formatting, so once in Word, the first thing I do is select the first chapter heading and choose Home -> Editing -> Select -> Select All Text With Similar Formatting. I then apply the Heading 1 style to the selected text. Just to see how the TOC in PB might look, I create a quick TOC in Word (PB compiler strips this TOC out).

I hope that helps with some ideas / suggestions. Apologies if some of this is kind of obvious to some.

George

Investintec has a promotion right now for a pdf to word converter if you "like" their product on facebook.

http://www.investintech.com/prod_a2d.htm

NetworkGeek

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352718#Comment_352718

Investintec has a promotion right now for a pdf to word converter if you "like" their product on facebook.

http://www.investintech.com/prod_a2d.htm

It says you get the "Giveaway Edition". What is that, I don't see it in the features comparison? Is it crippled, with a time limit, etc.?

George

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352727#Comment_352727

No it is not the crippled version. It is the full version of the program. I've used it a number of times and it works well. Does not have OCR recognition but it can be purchased if wanted.
List of features here:
http://www.investintech.com/products/desktop/a2d/features/

Like most other converters though it does not recognize footnotes.

NetworkGeek

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352727#Comment_352727

It says you get the "Giveaway Edition". What is that, I don't see it in the features comparison? Is it crippled, with a time limit, etc.?

Answered my own question by just trying it, it's the full features non-Pro version (which means you only lose OCR scanning).

And I must say...

...

WOW! This tool is great! I have tried a bunch of them, this one so far has taken 2 of my heavy graphics/text PDF files and converted them PERFECTLY!

Thanks for the tip!

George

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352731#Comment_352731

It says you get the "Giveaway Edition". What is that, I don't see it in the features comparison? Is it crippled, with a time limit, etc.?

Answered my own question by just trying it, it's the full features non-Pro version (which means you only lose OCR scanning).

And I must say...

...

WOW! This tool is great! I have tried a bunch of them, this one so far has taken 2 of my heavy graphics/text PDF files and converted them PERFECTLY!

Thanks for the tip!

I've tried quite a few of them myself and this one worked the best and had the most options for conversion. So when I saw it offered for free again I said I have to let people know. Glad it worked for you.

NetworkGeek

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352731#Comment_352731

It does not appear to convert footnotes/endnotes to real Word footnotes/endnotes so they display as such in Logos; not too much of a surprise I guess.

If we could just get a Word macro to do this, we would be set! It takes a while to convert them by hand...

toughski

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352734#Comment_352734

has anyone tried BCL easy converter? It has worked really well for me.

George

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352734#Comment_352734

It does not appear to convert footnotes/endnotes to real Word footnotes/endnotes so they display as such in Logos; not too much of a surprise I guess.

If we could just get a Word macro to do this, we would be set! It takes a while to convert them by hand...

Footnotes/endnotes are indeed a problem but I don't know of any converter that converts footnotes/endnotes to real Word footnotes/endnotes.

fgh

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352731#Comment_352731

WOW! This tool is great! I have tried a bunch of them, this one so far has taken 2 of my heavy graphics/text PDF files and converted them PERFECTLY!

No Mac version. [:'(]

It does not appear to convert footnotes/endnotes to real Word footnotes/endnotes so they display as such in Logos; not too much of a surprise I guess.

If we could just get a Word macro to do this, we would be set! It takes a while to convert them by hand...

This is a problem I have just begun to come across as well. How do the rest of you do it? Is there a better way than to replace the footnote numbers with new ones, and then copy-and-paste the content?

tom

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352731#Comment_352731

WOW! This tool is great! I have tried a bunch of them

Same here. I did have some minor editing to do, but this is the best tool that I have used so far.

Brother Mark

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352731#Comment_352731

WOW! This tool is great! I have tried a bunch of them, this one so far has taken 2 of my heavy graphics/text PDF files and converted them PERFECTLY!

Thanks for the tip!

Agree... this is pretty slick for a freebie! [Y]

tom

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352938#Comment_352938

WOW! This tool is great! I have tried a bunch of them
Same here. I did have some minor editing to do, but this is the best tool that I have used so far.

Now if only Logos could keep the format of the Word document in the PBB, everything would be great.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352948#Comment_352948

WOW! This tool is great! I have tried a bunch of them, this one so far has taken 2 of my heavy graphics/text PDF files and converted them PERFECTLY!

Thanks for the tip!

Agree... this is pretty slick for a freebie!

Pretty nice, but not perfect.

It failed completely to find any text in one PDF that I tried (which had already partially been OCR'ed though some pages were graphics only as my scanning software failed on those pages).

Then on another PDF I tried, a very long one, it did a remarkable job with all the layout, but missed all small-caps formatting so all the small caps came out looking like all lower case. That would be a pain to go through and find and fix manually, especially in a long document (this one was 571 pages).

Nice UI, fast performance.

Brilliant marketing campaign! Like on Facebook and you get a code (unique to you, I presume) which you can use to download the freebie. Some kind of clever use of Facebook's API no doubt. I've never seen anything like that before. Nicely done!

George

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352955#Comment_352955

WOW! This tool is great! I have tried a bunch of them, this one so far has taken 2 of my heavy graphics/text PDF files and converted them PERFECTLY!

Thanks for the tip!

Agree... this is pretty slick for a freebie!

Pretty nice, but not perfect.

It failed completely to find any text in one PDF that I tried (which had already partially been OCR'ed though some pages were graphics only as my scanning software failed on those pages).

Then on another PDF I tried, a very long one, it did a remarkable job with all the layout, but missed all small-caps formatting so all the small caps came out looking like all lower case. That would be a pain to go through and find and fix manually, especially in a long document (this one was 571 pages).

Nice UI, fast performance.

Brilliant marketing campaign! Like on Facebook and you get a code (unique to you, I presume) which you can use to download the freebie. Some kind of clever use of Facebook's API no doubt. I've never seen anything like that before. Nicely done!

It is still the best one I've found so far, and I tested a few of them.

Fr Devin Roza

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352718#Comment_352718

Investintec has a promotion right now for a pdf to word converter if you "like" their product on facebook.

http://www.investintech.com/prod_a2d.htm

Thanks for this tip. I just downloaded it and gave it a try - it works great. Not perfect of course, but as good as any I've seen. Thanks!

Fr Devin Roza

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/352734#Comment_352734

It does not appear to convert footnotes/endnotes to real Word footnotes/endnotes so they display as such in Logos; not too much of a surprise I guess.

If we could just get a Word macro to do this, we would be set! It takes a while to convert them by hand...

A week or two ago when I was developing the methodology I posted to export with footnotes to the Kindle I gave every PDF converter I could get my hands on a try to see if they would convert PDF footnotes correctly to Word. None of them worked, not even those who advertised they would do it. I tried with the trial versions of the really expensive ones as well, all the same.

Richard Wilson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/353401#Comment_353401

Today only, you can get a free (usual cost $50) PDF converter with OCR for when the PDF was saved as images rather than text. It is at http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/pdf-ocr42/ I have not tried it, but someone might like to see how good it is.

tom

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/353783#Comment_353783

Today only, you can get a free (usual cost $50) PDF converter with OCR for when the PDF was saved as images rather than text.

I have reported this as spam because the site did not offer a free PDF converter today, yesterday, a couple of days ago, etc...

Richard Wilson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/353828#Comment_353828

Sorry about that, but it wasn't spam. It was really and truly there. But the giveaway site obviously found some problem after they had made it available, and took it off the site and put a different program there. It happens occasionally on the site. But as longer as I am not suffering from hallucinations, the program was there at the beginning of the day.

George

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/353833#Comment_353833

Sorry about that, but it wasn't spam. It was really and truly there. But the giveaway site obviously found some problem after they had made it available, and took it off the site and put a different program there. It happens occasionally on the site. But as longer as I am not suffering from hallucinations, the program was there at the beginning of the day.

Would have been nice to get a pdf to word converter with OCR. Maybe some other time.

Richard Wilson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/354091#Comment_354091

The free PDF converter is back, today only, at http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/pdf-ocr42/ Although looking at the comments, the OCR does not do a great job with PDF files that contain immagines of the text.

Rich DeRuiter

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/355000#Comment_355000

The free PDF converter is back, today only, at http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/pdf-ocr42/ Although looking at the comments, the OCR does not do a great job with PDF files that contain immagines of the text.

The current free version of PDF-XChange Viewer has OCR for PDFs (it won't open jpegs directly). I've been using the free version as a replacement for the Adobe reader. But it does not include any PDF to DOC or DOCX conversion - not even in the paid versions.

I just tried a file I made by "printing" a JPEG image to PDF (with the "Cute PDF" printer), OCR'd and then copy/pasted into MSWord. It works, though line breaks in the original are preserved (the paragraphs don't 'flow'). So it would need substantial editing, or a macro, to deal with that (there probably is a macro for that somewhere).

BTW, I like the 'typewriter' function that lets me fill in PDF forms. It's a little quirky, in that the files have to be saved before they'll print properly (?!), but it is nice for that purpose. And yes, files saved, after being filled in, can be read as such by the Acrobat reader. You can also draw (arrows, boxes, circles, etc.), highlight, and a few other things. The paid versions do more.

EDIT: Actually, the PDF-Tools version and the PDF XChange Pro (but not the "Viewer Pro") version can convert to RTF or DOC. But they cost $45 and $75 respectively.

Timothy Brown

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/355092#Comment_355092

I just tried a file I made by "printing" a JPEG image to PDF (with the "Cute PDF" printer), OCR'd and then copy/pasted into MSWord. It works, though line breaks in the original are preserved (the paragraphs don't 'flow'). So it would need substantial editing, or a macro, to deal with that (there probably is a macro for that somewhere).

You may know this, but line breaks can be removed using the "Replace" function in MS Word as follows:

Select Edit, Replace

For the "Find what" box, click on "More"

Click "Special" and select "Paragraph Mark"

In the "Replace with" box, type one space (you won't be able to "see" it)

Click "Replace All"

Source(s):

MS Word Guru

The problem with using "Replace All" is that you get one huge paragraph with no breaks at all. But using the "Replace" function can speed up editing.

Rich DeRuiter

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/355151#Comment_355151

I just tried a file I made by "printing" a JPEG image to PDF (with the "Cute PDF" printer), OCR'd and then copy/pasted into MSWord. It works, though line breaks in the original are preserved (the paragraphs don't 'flow'). So it would need substantial editing, or a macro, to deal with that (there probably is a macro for that somewhere).

You may know this, but line breaks can be removed using the "Replace" function in MS Word as follows:

Select Edit, Replace

For the "Find what" box, click on "More"

Click "Special" and select "Paragraph Mark"

In the "Replace with" box, type one space (you won't be able to "see" it)

Click "Replace All"

Source(s):

MS Word Guru
The problem with using "Replace All" is that you get one huge paragraph with no breaks at all. But using the "Replace" function can speed up editing.

Thanks Timothy. I'm still learning Word, having migrated from WordPerfect (WP) last year sometime. I still miss a lot of things that were easier (to me) in WP, and my familiarity with it. If it weren't for unicode, and docx (for PB's) I'd probably still be using WP.

Tesfaye Haile

Greetings to you all. I wanted some one to hel me how I can use excel to build a personal Bibe using PBB. I am trying to build an Amharic Bible which I have documented in word from Genesis to Revelation. My problem is I do not have any clue how I can use excell tp incorporate the necessary codes and covert is back to word.dox file. I will appreciate you help. Thanks

Tesfaye Haile

fgh

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/383834#Comment_383834

I am trying to build an Amharic Bible which I have documented in word from Genesis to Revelation.

Welcome to the forums. Sorry no one has answered you earlier. It's generally better to start a new thread if you have a specific problem like this.

I believe another user called Tes has already done that job. You can probably contact him via the e-mail at the bottom of his post here, or you can click on his name and leave a message at the bottom of his profile page.

Tes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/384664#Comment_384664

I am trying to build an Amharic Bible which I have documented in word from Genesis to Revelation.

Welcome to the forums. Sorry no one has answered you earlier. It's generally better to start a new thread if you have a specific problem like this.

I believe another user called Tes has already done that job. You can probably contact him via the e-mail at the bottom of his post here, or you can click on his name and leave a message at the bottom of his profile page.

HI ,fgh it is my pleasure, no problem I am going to share him , what I have been helped to do.

Bill Cook

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/385156#Comment_385156

Wonder what the new Word 2013 will do? It is supposed to be able to open pdf's. Perhaps it can do some magic...

Rusty Davidson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/385606#Comment_385606

I have been using a preview version of Word 2013 and have been pleased that it will open most pdf documents in a relatively short time (converts then opens as Word docx). Like many converters, tables, pictures and background images can throw it for a loop, but the accuracy is quite high (especially for a Microsoft product!) It sometimes can get bogged down on documents 8MB and up, but so do most of the other converters I have used (Nuance, Adobe, and many online converters).

It is the only converter I use now.

Pavel Škoda

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/386667#Comment_386667

On-line conversion from PDF to DOC: http://www.convertpdftoword.net/

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/385606#Comment_385606

Wonder what the new Word 2013 will do?

I've been finding it very satisfactory.

Allen Wilkinson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/388081#Comment_388081

I am using ernel for PDF to WordIt can convert up to 50 PDF files into
word format in a single conversion cycle. The newly created word files are high in data and
rich in features. Overall, the software maintains every formatting
and layout of the original file along with every single bit of data. The software is available to download from http://www.pdftowordtool.com/

NetworkGeek

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/396022#Comment_396022

Thanks Allen...I have a question about it. Does it take footnotes in a PDF file, and convert them to true Footnotes in Word? This seems to be the big feature missing in many converters, and having true footnotes in a Logos PB is a great benefit. If I can avoid converting them manually that's a keeper for me!

Allen Wilkinson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/396023#Comment_396023

I have tried this while working on one of my project in which we need to convert some documents ebooks and it worked well and those books didn't have any foot notes, Well i will try doing so and tell you soon

Bohuslav Wojnar

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/396023#Comment_396023

I would be really surprised if it would convert footnotes. All I tried haven't done it. IMHO MS Word 2013 does the best job in conversion. It even converts the footnotes in case the pdf document originated (was saved) as pdf by MS Word. When I convert it back to docx, it maintains the footnotes.