Aug 07 2009
Not “The Best,” But “A List” Of Ways To Convert PDF & Word Documents
This was originally going to be a simple “The Best…” list on ways to easily convert PDF files to Word, and to do the reverse. It started off small when I began, but there has recently been an explosion in sites offering free conversion services, and I just haven’t had time to try them all out, nor put much time to carefully revising this post.
So it’s turned more into a somewhat disjointed “list” of these kinds of services.
I didn’t really understand why I might want to convert a document to a PDF until I read this article listing ten reasons Why To Convert Word To PDF.
Here are links to several online conversion tools:
Now, for the other way around.
One thing that has annoyed me is the difficulty in copying and pasting text from a PDF document I find on the Internet. Sometimes I see a portion of a document, for example, on language learning research that I want to email to someone or incorporate in an something I’m writing (with attribution, of course!), but it won’t allow me to extract a portion of the text.
There’s a free online application that lets me insert the PDF and, in seconds, come out with an editable text from the PDF. It’s called PDF Text Online. It works like a charm, and certainly serves my purposes.
In addition, Zamzar and Cometdocs lets you convert both ways. As do You Convert It and Convert Files. You can also use them to grab and convert YouTube videos for your laptop to show in class (though I never do that and just use the excellent EdublogsTV service).
There’s also a web tool called PDF UNdo that lets you do the same thing. As does PDF Hammer.
And, of course, there’s the appropriately-named site called Convert PDF To Word. And there’s another similarly named tool called PDF To Word. Plus, a newer one is called OCR Terminal.
The HTML PDF Converter will let you convert any webpage into a PDF file.
PDF My URL is an online app that lets you quickly and easily turn any webpage into a PDF file, too.
And, while we’re talking about PDF’s, you might find Text2PDF useful. You just copy and paste content into it and it magically converts it into a PDF. You might also want to try the PDF Maker.
Let me know which ones you think work best!
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4 responses so far
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Here is a link to some more ideas for creating and merging PDF documents.
http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com/2009/06/free-pdf-creation-and-merging.html
http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com/2009/05/bookletcreator.html
[Reply]
Thanks for sharing. I find a post about 30+ free pdf tools to convert, create and read pdf files. You may have a look at it .
http://www.anypdftools.com/blog/2009/06/11/30-free-online-offline-tools-of-pdf-converter-pdf-creator-and-pdf-reader.html#153
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Coverting pdf’s to text is very useful. I didn’t realize there were so many services out there. I’m going to try a few out. I followed your link from over on Twitter. I see your comments from time to time. Thanks for the useful article, Larry What are you teaching this year? I’m teaching CBET in Compton, CA. Small class with really nice ESL students.
[Reply]
Thanks for all your recommendations, on this topic and others. I have also landed here from Twitter.
I’ve been using PDF Creator for a few years, and I’m quite pleased. It does require downloading, but it’s free and does not render documents stamped with the name of the programme. It gets installed like a printer, and is available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/.
As regards converting PDF to Word (as well as video files with different extensions and Word 2007 to previous versions), Zamzar has worked well for me (and no downloading is required) but when pdf files are protected, it does not “open” them.
My 2 cents.
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