![]() Here's what I do when I need to get at the text in a PDF: I simply select it and paste it into a word processor or text editor. OCR is needed to convert a scan-based PDF, but would contribute NOTHING to a PDF that is *already* text based-which is the type of PDF which the vast majority of giveaways here are designed to work with, including today's. That's why poster #25, JerryW, is confused when he says "Without OCR built in, you can never achieve great conversions." He is mixing up the two technologies. To convert this type of PDF requires OCR software, which is a different domain altogether than the usual "PDF-to-Word" applications, including todays giveaway. ![]() A PDF produced from scanning contains no actual text, because the scan is essentially just a photograph. ![]() Please note that the statement about the poor performance of conversion programs is meant to apply strictly to text-based PDFs (i.e., ones in which the content is actual selectable text), NOT to documents which have been scanned. After you consider all this you should be willing to cut a lot of these developers some slack for their efforts. Some have had more success than others, but they will always just be "hacks." That's just the way it is Adobe intended PDF to be a "final" file format, not an open intermediate one. So over the years, software writers have had to "reverse engineer" the format in order to take a crack at devising a conversion algorithm. It is a binary, non-human-readable format, for which Adobe has never published the spec. PDF is not a "descriptive" and textual file format, like XML for example. However, there is a very specific reason for this. You can pick almost any one at random and you'll get results ranging from fair to complete gibberish. It's true what a number of people have complained about here, *no* developer can seem to produce a practicable and dependable PDF converter.
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