Converting PDF to MS Word

[Murphy]

Hello, everyone. I am a newbie here but I really need your help.
I am a senior student and recently my professor assigned to me a task that I have to complete a detailed report about Evolutionary Biology. He give me a large number of related PDF documents for reference. The problem is that I want to quote some of them to Office Word but don't know how.
I noticed that there are lots of genius here, anyone give me some tips please? All help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[RoryOF]

In general one cannot convert pdf documents to any other format. pdf format is designed to be essentially unalterable.

If you want to quote a section of a pdf document, and its permissions are set by the author to allow that, you can open your pdf reader (usually Adobe Reader) with the file you wish to quote and your word processing program (OpenOffice Writer or Microsoft Word) with your project file. Then in Adobe Reader highlight the section you wish to quote, type CTRL-C, then switch focus to the word processor window and Paste (CTRL-V) the piece from the clipboard.

[jrkrideau]

Hello, everyone. I am a newbie here but I really need your help.
I am a senior student and recently my professor assigned to me a task that I have to complete a detailed report about Evolutionary Biology. He give me a large number of related PDF documents for reference. The problem is that I want to quote some of them to Office Word but don't know how.
I noticed that there are lots of genius here, anyone give me some tips please? All help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

It depends on what you want to do but one clumsy but viable approach is to use GhostWriter to extact the text and then load it into OOo. Usually just cutting and pasting is going to be better but [shrug] this can be useful at times.

[Murphy]

Thanks for all your response, greatly appreciated them. When I follow the suggestion of RoryOF and try to copy the content but failed to do it. It seems that the PDF documents are set on restrictions by authors. Any additional tips please? I am really scared to type them all manually.

[RoryOF]

I haven't run into many unquotable pdf documents. I suggest you download http://documentation.openoffice.org/man ... tarted.pdf and see if you can extract from it. If you can't then we know there is a problem in your technique.

[jrkrideau]

Thanks for all your response, greatly appreciated them. When I follow the suggestion of RoryOF and try to copy the content but failed to do it. It seems that the PDF documents are set on restrictions by authors. Any additional tips please? I am really scared to type them all manually.

You might also want to look into scanner software. I believe that some scanner software offers PDF scanning. ABBYY says that it does. Your university library may have it.

[esperantisto]

There are a number of programs that convert PDF files into other formats, including MS Word, such as ABBYY PDF Transformer, Solid Converter PDF, Scansoft PDF Converter etc. The matter is that they can help mainly if text is preserved in PDF as a text layer. However, your documents may be scanned PDFs (pages are images in fact, not some text laid out). In such a case, you have no choice but to use OCR software such as ABBYY FineReader.

[williamkenworthy]

hi! for those who still need pdf to ms word converter, here's online ocr tool converter. hope it will still help.

[TheGurkha]

Zamzar say they can do it. But if the document is a protected PDF it might not be able to do it then, of course.