OT: Converting .pdf to .doc or .txt

Ragnarok-X · #1 January 9th, 2008, 06:17 PM

Frankly, i want to send some ebooks (.pdf) to work using my email-adress at work. However, instead of sending large noticable chunks, i would like to send a chapter a day or something like that. So i need a tool that can break up pdfs into .txt or .doc. Even one big .txt or .doc would help me, because i could manually cut out one chapter after another. Funnily the acrobat has an option to output as .txt, but whenever i try that i get a blank file.

Any ideas or suggestions ?

Suicide Junkie · #2 January 9th, 2008, 06:22 PM

If you can't save as text, it may be just a picture for the whole page.

geoschmo · #3 January 9th, 2008, 06:45 PM

Acrobat has a text select tool, but you can configure the pdf when you create it so that the text select tool does not work. If outputting to txt is giving you a blank file then that probably means they have done this. It's a rudimentary copy protection feature for ebook publishers.

You could get a print to pdf driver, there are a few free ones out there, and "print" a few pages at a time of the original into smaller pdfs.

If nothing else works, you could zip the pdf and break it up into volumes. The downside to this of course is you won't be able to read any of it until you get all the parts at work and put back together. But it would get around the big file problem.

Suicide Junkie · #4 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 · #5 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 · #6 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 · #7 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 · #8 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 · #9 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_ · #10 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.