PDF to ODF/Word converters

aarav2306 · 02-06-2009, 12:01 PM

hi
I have some scanned PDF files, I wish to convert them to Word/ODf. Any suggestions, pls help. Tried PDFtotext, not working.

rtspitz · 02-06-2009, 01:04 PM

Isn't a PDF document _the_ cross platform format for sharing documents ? Free viewers, looks the same everywhere. What's so bad about a PDF ?

I regularly curse people for sending me .docx files.

bmsiller · 02-06-2009, 01:29 PM

If you're looking to open a pdf for editing, you can use the OpenOffice PDF Import Extension to open your PDF in OpenOffice Draw (and save it as an odg). I don't know of any direct way to convert from odg to odf, however.

TITiAN · 02-06-2009, 02:15 PM

the PDF and PS viewer evince (part of gnome) allows copying text

farslayer · 02-06-2009, 02:19 PM

if none of that works convert the document to a tiff, and OCR it with tesseract.

pdf2tiff
http://python.net/~gherman/pdf2tiff.html

tesseract
http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

At least you'll get teh text that way, but probably without the formatting.

aarav2306 · 02-13-2009, 05:42 AM

Hi,
Sorry was away for a week.
Tried Tesseract, downloaded and unzipped and extracted the contents to my home folder and when I try the command
$ sh ./configure
I get the following result

Quote:

checking build system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking host system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking for cl.exe... no
checking for g++... no
checking for C++ compiler default output file name... configure: error: C++ compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.

The config.log is empty when I try editing with a Text Editor
Should I have tried to download tesseract-2.01.tar.gz instead of 2.03.

I had downloaded Evince using Synaptic Package Manager, but how do I start using Evince. When I try to open a PDF document using programs other than Document Viewer, it doesnt list Evince as an option and I am not able to locate Evince using the Applications menu.

TITiAN · 02-13-2009, 07:41 AM

aarav: what distro do you use? for debian, you can install it with apt (according to this package search:deb search.

farslayer · 02-13-2009, 08:15 AM

When you go to open a document, you can right click and say "open with other application", if evince is not in the list, then select "use a custom command", then browse to the evince executable.

Code:

user@it-lenny:~$ which evince
/usr/bin/evince

after you open one pdf file with evince it should appear in the right click open with menu for future use.

aarav2306 · 02-15-2009, 04:43 AM

Hi
I am using Ubuntu 8.10, was able to download Tesseract using Synaptic, thanks and am able to extract the text
Tried evince, not working with scanned images saved as pdf, works well with other pdf files. Was that the reason why pdftotext didnt work as well.

TITiAN · 02-15-2009, 09:02 AM

there is also gocr (should also be available via apt)
could you try if it works better?

farslayer · 02-15-2009, 12:48 PM

Tesseract actually does a better job at OCR than GOCR does.. but tesseract requires the original doc to be a tiff file.

A scanned doc converted to PDF would be an image file. so extracting text from it would be pretty much impossible other than via a OCR program.
PDF files created through other means can be indexed and searched as they actually contain text.. so yes i would say that was part of your problem.

Glad you got it all working !