Being a newbie: , I need some advice on how to convert PDF files to, repeat to, .SXW, .DOC, or .WPD. I've DL several PDF items from a Government site (forms, etc), but am unable to enter data via the PDF format and need to convert the items to do so under one of the foregoing packages. Is there anything of a freebie nature out there in ? I've found lots of stuff on converting to PDF, but I need to convert from PDF to other formats. Positive advice appreciated.

to from

Oopss.. this is a difficult question. In fact, in general PDF cannot be trivially converted to other formats. In Linux, the only easy thing to do is to extract the (plain) text contents from a PDF file using `xpdf' package (there is a program there called `pdftotext'). For me, it is successful to extract text from e.g. physics journals, but NOT the equations.

What is the reason for you to reverse-convert PDF to source document formats? I don't know of any program to reverse-convert PDF to other formats other than PS and plain text. Sorry.

Ask the Oo geeks in their forum, i.e.,

http://www.openoffice.org/

-> support (or docs) -> forum

Sheng-Chieh

It's a lot of time ago, but maybe this is useful to someone.
You can call oowriter (or ooffice) with the command-line argument "-pt" to print to a printer. So, to convert say test.doc (or test.sxw) to PDF, do this:

oowriter -pt "PDF 1.4 Converter Press" test.doc

Look in your Print dialog the exact name. You have now a pdf in your home dir. I use this little script:

#! /bin/bash
if [ $(echo $HOME/*.pdf) = $HOME/\*.pdf ];
then
oowriter -pt "PDF 1.4 Converter Press" $1
mv $HOME/*.pdf $1.pdf
else
echo "There are PDF files into home dir"
exit 1
fi


Hope this helps.

Romano / OOffice.org 1.1.4 on Mandriva 2005

Thanks! for the update.

I need this same kind of help for outputting an html file to pdf. Running fedora on my server...I have a page that is created from user input. They need to be able to print the page exactly how it's displayed without headers, footers or whatnot. It's being printed on business card paper, so the margins all need to be exact.

It prints fine now adjusting the browser settings....but the bossman wants it to print without having to adjust anything....just click and print.

Any ideas?

Thanks

I googled html to pdf software and found this....

HTMLDOC Home Page - Easy Software Products
A document conversion and formatting utility that produces indexed HTML, PDF and
PostScript files suitable for printing and on-line viewing.
(I deleted the link because I am still very new to the site)

It says it does mailing lists, so I assume it could be made to do business cards easy enough.

Unfortunately the previous answers are basically incorrect because they address the conversion from various formats TO pdf, not from PDF to the other format.

Now, the OP's question was originally motivated by filling PDF forms on a computer. In case next time there is another folk needing this feature, I found this workaround solution works for me, hopefully it helps others as well:

*) install Wine (usually your linux distro has the package for it already)

*) install PDF-Xchange viewer (http://www.tracker-software.com/prod...xchange-viewer), download the trial version, it's free. Install it under Wine.

*) Use the PDF-Xchange under Wine to do whatever you need with the PDF forms, including printing.

Yes this is NOT a pure Linux solution. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no PDF software in Linux that can fill forms. The closest would be Adode Reader which now does not support Linux anymore. I found from experience that this is a reasonable solution because this PDF viewer is lightweight, unlike Acroread.

Then, in this way, we do not have to involve the step of converting PDF to some other format and run into more problems than we asked for.

Wirawan

Just aother junk spam post to a 9 year old thread linking to a non-free PDF viewer...

What is this - PDF spam week?!

can you imagine the "fun" one would have trying to get that code to run on RH7.3
-- yes RH 7.3 !!!! from the first post

nothing in over a year

wirawan0's LAST post was on 02-13-14, 03:28 PM