"Extracting PDF Content for MS Office"

By Rowan Hanna
PDF Store Support Team
Issue 24 for 2005

Last week, we looked at your options when wanting to extract usable text from image only PDF documents. If your document was authored electronically, and has never been scanned, chances are that its text will be recognizable to extraction technologies. That was the first hurdle, but certainly not the last. Now you need to decide how you want your output.

In fact, Acrobat itself allows you to save your PDF content out as various formats, including RTF, TIFF and HTML. While this output may be adequate for your needs, many 3rd party tools offer more specialized output. If the presentation and layout of the document are of primary importance, perhaps BCL AllPDF Converter is the way to go. The PDF to MS Word functionality preserves the "look and feel" of the original PDF, and the .DOC output (for MS Word) preserves paragraph structure, bulleted lists and simple tables, while detecting headers and footers in the source document.

On the other hand, tabular content might be better processed by Investintech.com's Able2Extract, which is a multi-format extraction tool that does not require Acrobat.

These are just two of the many PDF Extraction tools available from PDF Store.