Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Welcome beginner. Please answer all of the questions below which may provide information necessary to answer your question.
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Which version of OpenOffice.org are you using? 2.4
What Operating System (version) are you using? XP Pro
What is your question or comment?
Can OpenOffice import (rather than export) a PDF document? What I need is to import a PDF document that has both an image layer and a text layer and then export the text into a different format such as plain text, Word or similar, or RTF. The problem is that the documents I am working with have non-English text in them and saving as text in Adobe Reader produces garbage. Thanks.

No, OOo cannot import pdf files.

Short answer: No.
Long answer: Not yet, you may find this interesting reading.

EDIT: just saw that you are working with a non-english text. Going by your statement i take it it is not in the latin alphabet? If so, make sure you have support for that language installed or you're not going to get anything else than garbage whatever you do.

If you have OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta and install the PDF Import Extension, then yes you can import PDFs (into Draw) and even edit them. It is not perfect, but it is pretty good. You can save the PDF in the new ODF Hybrid format as well which gives you both the PDF and the ODF in the same file.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta is found here: http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html
The Sun PDF Import extension is found here: http://extensions.services.openoffice.o ... /pdfimport

ccornell wrote:If you have OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta and install the PDF Import Extension, then yes you can import PDFs (into Draw) and even edit them. It is not perfect, but it is pretty good. You can save the PDF in the new ODF Hybrid format as well which gives you both the PDF and the ODF in the same file.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta is found here: http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html
The Sun PDF Import extension is found here: http://extensions.services.openoffice.o ... /pdfimport

Thanks, ccornell. have a problem, though: I installed 3.0 and launched Writer once. When I tried to install the extension, I got the following message: "the extension can't be installed as the following system dependencies are not fulfilled: OO.org 3.0". Do you know why? BTW, I also previously installed OOo 2.4 on my machine. Thanks.

Are you installing the extension from within OOo3.0Beta or from just clicking on the OXT? If you have 2.4 and 3.0 installed at the same time, it's possible that when you click the OXT it's trying to install it in OOo2.4 not 3.0. So... start OOo3.0, and go to Tools > Extension manager and install the extension there.

ccornell wrote:Are you installing the extension from within OOo3.0Beta or from just clicking on the OXT? If you have 2.4 and 3.0 installed at the same time, it's possible that when you click the OXT it's trying to install it in OOo2.4 not 3.0. So... start OOo3.0, and go to Tools > Extension manager and install the extension there.

Thanks, the installation worked. I tried it on a couple of PDFs with mixed results. My problem is that I have a bunch of PDFs that contain text using the Arabic script (e.g. Arabic, Farsi, etc.). All I need is to be able to extract the text layer properly and save it into something like a text file with encoding or a Word document. Several applications that I tried can't do it correctly. In the case of OOo3, I tried 3 docs. All loaded without errors, but in case of two of those, it displayed gibberish on the screen. The third it displayed coreectly and I saved it, but I am not sure how I can extract the text.

For the gibberish problem, as Caracalla said, make absolutely sure you have the fonts installed. PDFs can have embedded fonts, so can display a font type you do not have installed locally. A missing font type is a likely source of your prob.

Once the PDF is imported.. just copy the text into Writer... should be easy.