PDF to HTML

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Hufford
  • Start date Start date
J

John Hufford

I would appreciate any recommendations for Free software that converts PDF
files to HTML while preserving the format. I have seen several postings
here and on alt.comp.freeware.discussion but so far all responses point to
software tools that are not free. TIA!
 
John,

If you use Firefox as a browser there is a free "extension" that
converts the pdf to html on the fly. It is pretty transparent to the
user. It prompts you to select if you want html or pdf. If you choose
pdf it takes a while to load the frame but if you choose html it loads
right away. All the text and images are there... it just doesn't have
the viewing controls that you get in a pdf document.

I think I've got some info on my Firefox blog on this extension. If it
is not there just go to Firefox and switch. If you have not changed
browsers yet you really should give Firefox a try. I think you'll
really enjoy searching the web. It is more efficient and helps you
interact with the web in a lot of ways.

Check out my BLOG, no ads, no banners, no popups... just good
information.

http://mightyjoefirefox.blogspot.com/
 
Il Sun, 26 Mar 2006 20:33:38 -0000, John Hufford ha scritto:
I would appreciate any recommendations for Free software that converts PDF
files to HTML

I've just discovered that if you carefully copy from a PDF and paste into
an Openoffice Writer document you can have pretty good results.
Then Openoffice can save in HTML format...
 
Thanks for the reply. I went to your Blog and found the link for the
FireFox extension and installed it. Unfortunately it does not handle
any graphics and it does not render all fonts correctly. So, the
formatting is not preserved. Thanks again anyway!
 
El said:
Il Sun, 26 Mar 2006 20:33:38 -0000, John Hufford ha scritto:


I've just discovered that if you carefully copy from a PDF

And just how does one do that? The purpose of PDF is to prevent copying,
isn't it?
 
And just how does one do that? The purpose of PDF is to prevent copying,
isn't it?


Not really. The purpose of .pdf is to preserve format. The creator of
the pdf may lock certain functions to stop people copying, saving,
printing etc, but if they haven't done this, you can select text, images
and copy and paste them.
 
Most PDF documents are not protected. It is relatively easy to highlight
and copy text in most PDF files and paste it into another open document.
I'm looking for a tool that will convert the PDF to HTML while preserving
the orginal format and it won't cost anything to do this.
 
Most PDF documents are not protected. It is relatively easy to highlight
and copy text in most PDF files and paste it into another open document.
I'm looking for a tool that will convert the PDF to HTML while preserving
the orginal format and it won't cost anything to do this.

John, I understand what you are looking for, but unless the formatting
in your pdf document is very straightforward, I doubt if you will find
anything to do an acceptable job.

Adobe have a free online submission service to convert pdf to html for
the visually impaired to use text to speech recognition.
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html
This may be of assistance, however it's worth reading their FAQ as it
seems that results can be unpredictable, depending on the type of
formatting that is used in the pdf.
 
I would appreciate any recommendations for Free software that converts PDF
files to HTML while preserving the format. I have seen several postings
here and on alt.comp.freeware.discussion but so far all responses point to
software tools that are not free. TIA!

I haven't tried it but http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdftohtml/

"Pdftohtml is a tool based on the Xpdf package which translates pdf
documents into html format."
 
Thanks M.L.! This does a pretty impressive job of converting a complex PDF
file to HTML code. There will be some minor cleanup to do but all-in-all
this is the kind of tool I was looking for.
Thanks again!
 

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