convert a PDF file back to word without losing format?

[put...@adobeforums.com]

Hi guys,

Is there a way to convert a PDF file back to word without losing any format??? I no longer have the word file...thanks

[Nathan...@adobeforums.com]

Not without losing the format. You see, the formatting was already thrown away when the PDF was created. Acrobat does its best if you save as RTF, but it's not going to look identical.

There are some 3rd-party programs that might be able to do a better job of it--I don't have the links, unfortunately.

Nathan

[Bernd_...@adobeforums.com]

PDF files are not backup files of word documents.

[fors...@adobeforums.com]

You cannot convert from PDF to WORD, but one of the things which I suggest you do if and only if you want to keep your document the exact same way and if not reformat through PDF is to take a snapshot of it if it is that you have adobe 6.0 use the snap shot tool and paste it into a word document. It will not look fabulous but you will have a copy of your file and you could have ability to reformat it through Adobe Acrobat.

[de_...@adobeforums.com]

forsythe:
In Acrobat 6:
file>save as and for type of file choose *.doc.

But you'll still loose the layout.

[Ian_B...@adobeforums.com]

Try this for PDF to Word (I have not tried it but I would like someone to try it and tell the forum what it's like):
<http://www.scansoft.com/pdfconverter/>

It cost around $50 and judging from the name I would guess it "scans" the PDF in some way.
Cheers
Ian

[mk]

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 10:13:40 -0700, put...@adobeforums.com wrote:

>Hi guys,
>
>Is there a way to convert a PDF file back to word without losing any format??? I no longer have the word file...thanks

As well as the other options, and ignoring the suggestion that you
cannot do what you want, which is wrong, I throw in OmniPage. This is
an OCR program that does much much more. I bought it primarily to
recreate some Word files from PDF documents.

Did fine. Not perfect, but certainly better than other approaches I
have seen.

It comes from the same people who make pdfconverter. (see other
message.)

MK

[Kate_P...@adobeforums.com]

I tried the PDF Converter and found that it didn't work well for large files with lots of graphics (2MB to 6MB). The converter is a plug-in for Word that does indeed act like a scanner. The files I tried to convert had lots of light and dark areas in the background, and each of those was identified as a region. All of those frames made the columns of text break differently in the Word document than they did on the original, and removing the dozens of frames would have taken forever.

Also, some of the pages contained text that was embedded in the graphic, rather than the text being a separate layer, so the converter scanned the whole page as art. That meant that the text in it wasn't editable in the resulting Word doc. That's why I posted a question earlier asking if Acrobat 5.0 would let me edit PDF text that's embedded in graphics (I haven't had time to look through all of the threads in the forum to see if that question has been answered before!).

ScanSoft indicated that I would need their OCR software to be able to convert the graphics into editable text, but the cost for that is definitely prohibitive.

The PDF Converter would probably work for simple documents, but not for the complex projects that I work on.

Kate

[Doug...@adobeforums.com]

Why not just print the pdf and ocr it?

[bzz...@adobeforums.com]

I use ABBYY fine reader, to scan the pdf. it pics up ocr as well as images and you keep 95% of the formating. images and all. I have been scanning a lot of contracts lately, so the formating is pretty crazy and finereader does great.

[Ian_M...@adobeforums.com]

finereader is a very good OCR engine, it was the standard OCR engine in software that my previous company produced.