OT: Converting .pdf to .doc or .txt

Suicide Junkie · #1 January 9th, 2008, 06:50 PM

How about a rewritable CD?
Or just collect a whole bunch of books and burn them all to a regular CD?

AgentZero · #2 January 9th, 2008, 09:12 PM

Or a thumb drive. It's far more common for an office computer to have USB ports than it is for them to have CD-rewriters. Just make sure to subtly check out what your company policy is on USB drives, since a lot of places are quite finiky about what they let you hook up to their computers.

Suicide Junkie · #3 January 9th, 2008, 09:15 PM

You don't need a rewriter to read it.
Don't they let you bring in music CDs?

AgentZero · #4 January 9th, 2008, 09:25 PM

Quote:

Suicide Junkie said:
You don't need a rewriter to read it.
Don't they let you bring in music CDs?

Oh, nevermind.

I read it as him wanting to get the pdfs from work to home, not the other way around. But again, the last few places I've worked, you didn't even have a CD drive unless your job required it, but you always had USB ports.

The easiest thing is still probably to print the ebook to a series of pdfs small enough for your purposes, and then download them one bit at a time. You could even upload all the pdfs onto a webmail account (if you can access it from work), and download chapters as you need them.

Will · #5 January 10th, 2008, 01:12 AM

I know Acrobat has this, but am not sure about Acrobat Reader... but there is an option in the (I think) Tools menu that lets you chunk out pages of a PDF into different files.

Failing that, I second the PDF Print driver. Just "print" whatever page range you want to that driver, and it will save it to a new, smaller, PDF file.

dogscoff · #6 January 10th, 2008, 06:28 AM

There are loads of freeware/shareware/trialware/crippleware pdf>other format converters out there. Some are good, some less so, but they should all be able to extract the text from the files so that you can copy/paste it into a .txt file.

Try http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0....erter&tag=srch for starters.

Dan_ · #7 January 10th, 2008, 08:58 AM

Quote:

Will said:
Failing that, I second the PDF Print driver. Just "print" whatever page range you want to that driver, and it will save it to a new, smaller, PDF file.

This was what I was thinking. You can install Cute PDF writer - a free virtual printer which when printed to saves the output to a new pdf (it asks for a file name when you print). Just 'print' what you want into a smaller pdf and send that.

But a CD or thumb drive would be easiest.

Leternel · #8 January 10th, 2008, 02:09 PM

in the category "crazy idea", you can use tools that recognize text from pictures to read screenshot from the pdf...