pdf 2 doc and graphics question

[Rob]

I've tried several programs out there to convert PDF to Word DOC or RTF.
While some seem to work better than others, all seem to suffer from one big
problem. I have a "quick start guide" that an employee wrote, it was
converted to PDF and the employee is no longer here, and the original .DOC
is missing.

I need to modify this document which contains many screenshots. I've used
PDF 2 Word 1.4, PDFgrabber and PDF 2 Word 2.26 (by a different vendor than
1.4 above). All of them really destroy the quality of the screenshot
graphics images. They look fine in the PDF, but are barely legible in the
..RTF or .DOC. At this point if three different vendors share the same
issue, I have to ask myself, is there a technical reason for this? Is there
another solution that I haven't looked at? Thanks!

 

[Rob Schneider]

tried Adobe Acrobat?

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Rob]

i only have v5 of acrobat, it did the worst job **by far**. ill see if
adobe has a more current demo available.

 

[Rob]

interestingly enough, 6.0 did a great job with the graphics (so at least i
know it can be done) but it completely hosed the document formatting.
sigh...........

 

[Rob Schneider]

Glad you found Adobe 6. PDF wasn't designed to go backwards. A large
part of the issue is the extreme complexity of Word's doc format. It's
very complex process. That's why there hasn't been lots of attention on
this.

The good news is that document formating can be relatively easily
recoverd by simply re-typing the doc and using style sheets. Yes, takes
time and is manual, but ...

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Rob]

gotta say, one of the utilities i used did a phenominal job maintaining the
layout, just the graphics were ugly. it might be difficult to do it
properly, but nothing is impossible .

 

[Rob Schneider]

So, which was the "one"? Use Adobe for getting the graphics right and
the other one for text, and use Word to integrate. Since this not an
everyday thing, works for me.

rms

 

[Rob]

thats what im going to have to do, unfortunately there are three documents
totalling approximately 400 pages with about the same number of graphic
items.

the program that worked for me to keep the formatting was PDF 2 Word v2.2.6
from CAD-KAS for $39.