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FeelLikeANut
12-14-2006, 02:13 AM
I've decided that Adobe's products, even just the simple reader, are become far too bloated. Can people recommend a solid but lightweight PDF viewer? Is there a de facto standard viewer among the open source community? Thanks.
And on a slightly similar subject, I need on occasion to convert PDF documents to Word documents. I should only need to do this when the PDF is simple text. Nothing interactive. Nothing fancy. What's the easiest way to do this?
_Aerospace_Eng_
12-14-2006, 02:35 AM
Look up a program called FoxIt. Its a pdf reader that should be free.
Speedle
12-14-2006, 02:57 AM
well i know only acrobat but it's adobe's product...:)
I like CutePDF: http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp
Not only is it a viewer, but also a converter.
I had FoxIt for a while, but the program started to experience problems, wanting to update, then not being able to. I got rid of it once those problems caused the program to lock up. But, when it's functioning correctly, it is a good program, too.
KDLA
the tree
12-14-2006, 10:35 AM
I use KPDF (http://kpdf.kde.org/), purely because it came with Kubuntu and I never saw good reason to change, it seems that is based on XPDF (http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/home.html) which should run across the board.
FeelLikeANut
12-14-2006, 11:23 AM
Thanks for the recommendations. FoxIt Reader is exactly what I needed. It's lightweight and fast. For a PDF writer, I went with pdfFactory. It's also lightweight and fast, and also configurable and efficient.
I'm still looking to convert a PDF to a Word document, though, or any other format that an be imported into Word while still retaining text (not imported as an image) and all formatting.
ray326
12-14-2006, 01:33 PM
I don't think it's possible to recover the original text from a PDF. The content of a PDF is basically Postscript.
Can OCR translate it back to Word? I know it can do that for scanned images, because we've done that before.
_Aerospace_Eng_
12-14-2006, 03:33 PM
The pro version of FoxIt Reader can convert the pdf to a text file.
FeelLikeANut
12-14-2006, 11:29 PM
Yeah ... PDFs embed fonts, meaning that a PDF is not simply a picture. It's actually stored as text in some form.
_Aerospace_Eng_
12-14-2006, 11:43 PM
Foxit also makes a pdf editor. Its only a trial version though. With the editor you can change fonts, colors, add images, and resave it.