My girlfriend has a few PDF files she wants to make into Word documents. Does anyone know of an app for Mac that can do this?

There was one years ago that took a scanned image and converted it to MS Word called OCR or something... But it was a hit and miss affair and I didn't rate it at the time beacause so many characters weren't picked up by it.

Alternatively has she tried using the select tool in Acrobat to copy and paste the text into Word?

Just a thought...

I've used PDF2Office it's not perfect but it works when damn recruitment agencies want to mangle your nicely typeset (LaTeX) resume so they can stick their logo up the top.

Try the old File Juicer.

cheers,

cw

Full version of Adobe Acrobat 8.

File -> Export -> Word Document.

Works best if the original file was a text based pdf. Not a scan. However, Acrobat does have a built in OCR function.

The most commonly used mac OCR program was Omnipage. A lot of scanners supplied a lite version with the bundled software. Personally I think it took nearly as long to manually fix the errors as it would have taken to retype the document. I normally just highlight the text and copy and paste it into word. This normally works OK unless the original text is in multiple columns.

Yes, I'm with samwalk. As long as it's not a jpeg or similar, you can drag a page at a time into textedit or word and this usually works well.

Adobe Acrobat 8 is the way to go. I used it today and the result was perfect.

Cut and paste?

The text tool needs to be activated in Preview.

was asked to convert a pdf back to text just recently. if it was created from an original text layout, with pics etc. one should be able to use the text tool in Preview to copy & paste into a document. in my case the document was not..... some boxes, even though text, could not be selected & copied. bear in mind you can create pdf's from just about anywhere/anything nowadays.
i've used
Omnipage pro successfully in past years. later versions have been very good, allowing you to keep formatted text at least. my preferred method & most important step was to make greyscale, good enough resolution, scans, up the contrast on faint text, .. then put them through the OCR filter. 99% spot on,.. so long as the form of the text was well defined, it was good. later versions came out with different language options so that once scanned, you could run a spell check on whatever language the document was created..

I use Adobe Reader 8 the free version and highlight the PDF text you want to copy, right mouse over the highlighted text/pic, copy or copy image. Open a Word document and paste your copy. Should be done.

Acrobats OCR seems to work OK provided it is a page of plain text, not highly formated with tabs, columns etc.
The cut and paste option only works with an electronically created pdf, rather than a scanned image pdf.

But I prefer to use ReadIris Pro for scanned image pdfs. It recognizes all the areas of text on a document as seperate frames. You can deselect things like logos, footers etc, and then get it to convert to an RTF for word. When it does this it creates tab and column formatting quite well.

The secret to OCR accuracy on a character by character basis is the image resolution, and the amount of noise (spurious black dots) on the page. A high res scan of a faxed document can still give good OCR output, compared to a lower resolution. Clean out the noise (despeckle) and its surprising how well the software does. Hand written markups are a real pain though, but can be erased from the image file pixel by pixel with something like graphic converter, or just skip the paragraph and retype manually.

I've found it better to break up a large document into sections, scanned at high res, rather than work with a full document at a lower resolution. I've had the software crash if overloaded.

Hope this helps.

I have an pdf i created a few years ago (on a PC) that for some reason printed the pages in reverse order.

For some time i have wanted to correct this. The word document was corrupted soon after (it crashes word when trying to open it - i am given a dialogue box about what format to import from) so no joy there. I have tried both preview and acrobat (v8 professional) to print the pdf in reverse order and save as pdf - this does not resolve the issue with preview; acrobat won't allow save to pdf anyway.

I tried converting to a word document through acrobat and it created images of each page .

Anyone able to offer a means to resolve this? At least if i can get the page order fixed, copy and paste will be a lot less annoying...

Decryption: I use the full version of Acrobat. If you want, email them to me and I can convert and send back the word docs for you.

Edit: Ok, Didn't read that it was an old post - Woops!

avolve: try Zamzar. It does a surprisingly good job.