Sunday, October 28, 2007

Converting PDF into RTF

PDF is a very popular way exchanging documents because the layout stays the same no matter what computer you are on, BUT there is no way to edit them or put them in your notes in your genealogy program. There are two ways I do it. Copy/Paste from Acrobat Reader or OCR it.

With Copy/Paste you need to paste it into word processor using the text selection tool. But you have to find the beginnings of your paragraphs & take out the end of lines within that paragraph. I will “Justify” all the text and do an indent, that way I can see my paragraphs.

The other is OCR but rather than print, scan, and convert to text, you just use the snapshot tool in Acrobat to copy and paste it into your OCR program. I found a free program that does an ok job of this called TopOCR http://www.topocr.com/ . It doesn’t work well with bold, italics, or pictures, but for free it does speed things up. I just found out if you change your setting to scanner mode "Settings->Image-> Source->Scanner" it will do a better job even with this copy/paste method in TopOCR.

Rede’s method:
Share Convert a PDF into a RTF Part 1 (Copy/Paste)
http://blip.tv/file/449914

Share Convert a PDF into a RTF Part 2 (OCR)
http://blip.tv/file/449936

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your demo with TopOCR would have gone MUCH better if you had set the TopOCR Image Window to Scanner mode and not Camera. You can do this by selecting the menu "Settings->Image-> Source->Scanner"

Dennis said...

I may see if Rede can redo the video. I see it is a bit more accurate on that setting.

Thanks