Solid Documents Blog

Extract Tables to Excel

2009-07-06T09:55:00.000-07:00

One of the many powerful features of Solid PDF Tools is the ability to extract tables from a PDF file to Excel. The same feature is also available in Solid Converter PDF to Word. You choose whether you want to extract tables from an entire document, from a single page or a range of pages. You can even automate this process with scripts.

Table Extraction Made Easy
Solid PDF Tools provides three convenient options for extracting tables from your PDF documents.

1. Use the Document Menu - Open your PDF, click the Document Menu and select Extract Tables to Excel.

2. Use the Right Click Contextual Menu - Simply select the page or pages you'd like to extract from in the Pages Pane, then Right Click and choose Extract Tables to Excel.

3. Use the Toolbar Button which automatically performs this function for you.

With each method a dialog screen will appear which allows you to select the pages to convert along with additional conversion options.

The Exported File in Excel
In order to ensure accuracy, each table in your PDF file is extracted into its own worksheet in Excel.

Scan to PDF Using Solid PDF Tools

2009-06-29T14:39:00.000-07:00

Solid PDF Tools provides a number of powerful scanning features for creating PDF documents, including:

• Scanning multiple pages into one or more PDF documents
• The use of automatic document feeders to scan multiple pages quickly
• Applying OCR during the scanning process to create a searchable text layer in your scanned PDF documents.

To create a PDF document from your scanner, simply open Solid PDF Tools and click Scan to PDF.

Next, select the "Scanning" features that best meet your needs:

1. "Scan As"- Allows you to select the best settings for each page based on the original document, create a document with the smallest file size, or set Custom Optimization setting via the Tools | Options dialog screen.

2. Text Features - The Text tab provides settings that allows you to create a searchable text layer (Office 2003 or higher) and Auto Rotate the scan. Searchable text allows you to quickly find needed information in a document.

3. PDF Output Features - Set your Output settings to Open, Save, or Save and Open your PDF document after it has been created. You can direct Solid PDF Tools to Save your new file in a specific location on your computer, and you can assign file names automatically.

To create your new PDF document click the "Scan to PDF" button.

Once your document has been scanned you can continue scanning, or you can crop, rotate or discard the scan and start over.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
Scanning a paper document produces an image file. In order to search a scanned file using keywords or phrases a searchable text layer must be applied. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature in Solid PDF Tools will allow you to add a searchable text layer, making your documents far more useful that ever before.

Upon completion your PDF document will be displayed in the Solid PDF Tools user interface where you can search for keywords and phrases, watermark all or specific pages, rearrange pages, combine other PDF documents with your new file, and much more.

Convert PDF to Word with Solid PDF Tools

2009-06-12T13:15:00.000-07:00

Converting a PDF document into a Microsoft® Word document is easy with Solid PDF Tools. On the Solid PDF Tools Start Page, simply click the “Convert PDF to Word” link in the “Getting Started” section. Then on the palette choose a file (or files) using the file dialog screen.

Advanced Options:
Using the advanced options dialog screen you can set specific conversion options that allow you to control Layout, Image Recovery, Table Detection and more.

Layout and Formatting
Choose the reconstruction mode that is most appropriate for the conversion of your PDF document.

• Flowing - Recovers page layout, columns, formatting, and graphics, and preserves text flow.
• Continuous - Correctly reconstructs the text order but will only recover paragraph formatting, graphics, and text flow.
• Plain Text - Displays text without any formatting or layout
• Exact - Uses Word text boxes to ensure that the text and graphic layout in the Word document is the same as the PDF document.

Table Detection
Table detection may be applied when Flowing or Continuous reconstruction mode is used to recognize page layout. This option is ideal for text documents.

Headers and Footers
Solid PDF Tools provides you with the option for converting headers and/or footers. This allows you to place them in Microsoft® Word's header/footer feature, keep them on each page as separate text boxes, or remove them altogether. To recover headers and footers you must select the "Flowing" reconstruction mode.

Converted File
Your converted PDF document will automatically open in Word for editing.

Convert PDF to Word on OS X and Linux

2009-06-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

(or, why online services matter)

Once in a while we get customers that ask when we're going to port our software to OS X so that they can use them on their shiny new Mac desktop or notebook (a few people ask for Linux support as well, although they are few and far between).

The answers we've given over the years typically amounts to "Porting them would take a lot of work and we don't know if we could recoup the cost".

Over the years a number of "good" workarounds have come up. On Macs both Boot Camp and Virtualization software work well, if you're willing to spend the time to learn how to set them up. Similar options are available for Linux.

When we suggest them to customers we typically hear: "Buying Microsoft Windows, Office and possibly a virtualization product and learning how to use them together with what I already have is a lot of work, and we switched to get away from poorly designed software, your products excluded of course".

If you're in this boat, we suggest looking at some of the free services we offer online to:

If your computer has a reasonably modern browser, can send and receive e-mail, read DOC files and PDF files, it can use the above sites. They're free, easy to use, and do a few of the things that people commonly use our software for.

Why the Desktop Still Matters

If privacy is a concern (all your files are transmitted to the above sites and back without encryption) or you need to use some of the more advanced features of our software, we felt it would be useful to outline some of the options you have on OS X and Linux. Technical details on how to implement them are outside the scope of this post (honestly, there are so many resources available with just a few Google searches away the information would be redundant).

1. Dual Booting.

In a nutshell you divide your hard drive in two (or more) and install an additional operating system on your computer. When you reboot you get an option to boot into one OS or the other.

This typically offers the best performance of all the options available, at the cost of the inconvenience of having to reboot each time you want to use applications on an OS that you aren't booted into at the moment.

- Dual Booting on OS X.

Apple's solution for dual booting on their computers is called Boot Camp. Apple has the rundown on how to set it up on their website.

This requires an Intel Mac, a recent version of OS X (it was taken out of beta with version 10.5), a license of Microsoft Windows and a license of Microsoft Office for Windows (we recommend 2003 or newer). Be sure to read Apple's system requirements for the full and most recent list of what you'll need.

- Dual Booting on Linux (is now easy)

Linux has a number of different ways of dual booting with Windows, the easiest of which is called Wubi. As with OS X, you'll need a copy of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.

2. Virtualization

Virtualization is running Windows in a window so that you can use Windows applications on Linux or OS X. If this seems a bit like a Rube Goldberg machine (or a Yo Dawg joke) you're right, but so are so many other things we use on computers on a daily basis.

If you've got a little time, the willingness to read and/or Google minor problems and enough of a computer to run two OSs side by side, virtualization is a great option. This does require that you have a license of Microsoft Windows and Office to install in the VM.

- Virtualization on OS X

Newer Apple Macs (Intel based ones) can run virtualization products. Common applications for this include Parallels Desktop, VMWare Fusion and Sun VirtualBox.

Please note that no one in our offices owns any Intel based Macs and we haven't tested any of the above products. YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

If you happen to use our software on a Mac in this way let us and the other readers know about your experiences in the comments below.

- Virtualization on Linux

Two commonly used desktop virtualization products on Linux are VMWare Workstation and Sun VirtualBox. In our experience both are fine if you just plan on using the VM to run Windows applications.

If you plan on doing complex software QA (the kind that involves installing and uninstalling and installing and uninstalling...) you may find that VMWare Workstation is a better fit for you with it's better support for multiple trees of snapshots. Of course if you have no idea what snapshots are you may want to try both to see which works better for you.

- Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator)

From their website:

"Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop."

Basically this lets you run some Windows applications on Linux without the need for Windows.

This tends to work for a few supported applications but we haven't ever had good success with our own products. As with many things involving Linux, we cannot rule out user error on our part and are merely offering cautionary information :>.

We tried using Solid PDF Tools with Wine version 1.1.21 on Arch Linux. It kind of worked with a few files (formatting was lost) and hung on a few others that the product normally can convert in Windows.

If someone can suggest how to configure Wine to work better with our products we'd be happy to know (post comments, e-mail us, send a bananagram, etc.). Until then we'd suggest using Virtulization to use our software on Linux.

Did we miss anything you love? Feel free to contact us, or let everyone know about it in the comments below.

WYSIWYG Content Extraction

2009-05-26T11:15:00.000-07:00

WYSIWYG Content Extraction

Extracting PDF Tables to Excel
Using Solid PDF Tools or Solid Converter PDF® you can quickly and easily extract tables or images from your PDF files for use in other documents.

With our new WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) user interface you can extract tables from a selected set of pages within your PDF document with a single click.

• Using Shift+Click or Ctrl+Click, select the desired pages in your PDF.
• Right-click and select "Extract Tables to Excel". You can convert "All Pages" or a specific "Page Range" from your PDF.

Selecting "Launch Microsoft Office Excel" will open your converted content in Excel after your tables have been extracted.

Image Extraction
You can quickly extract vector and bitmap images from a selected set of pages in your PDF document. Once extracted your images can be used in other documents. The same right-click functionality mentioned above makes image extraction easy.

Selecting the "Prompt for Options" check box opens the "Extract Images" dialog screen which provides you with options for saving your images in one of the following image formats: BMP, PNG, JPG, Tif or Gif.

It's that easy!

Headers and Footers in Free PDF to Word Services

2009-05-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month we compared the conversion quality of Free PDF to Word and Zamzar. Although we touched on many features our service supports, one that we didn't explore was detecting and creating headers and footers when converting PDF files to Word.

In case you haven't used them before, headers and footers are located near the tops and bottoms of a document in Microsoft Word, typically outside the margins of a document. They are usually the same in an entire document, although it is possible to use different headers and footers for different sections. To create or modify them simply double click near the top or bottom margins of a document in Word.

The full extent of how to work with them is outside the scope of this blog post, but a Google search for headers and footers will likely get you the information you need.

Why Headers and Footers Matter

Surprisingly, few Word documents that customers send us make use of headers and footers (Apparently manually correcting each page number is fun for people. Or they're paid by the hour).

In short, headers and footers allow you to make a change and have it reflect in the rest of the document. Unlike styles (another way to manage large documents in Word), they are really easy to use and can quickly save you time when you create or modify a document.

A good example of this is when the company you work for is bought out by another company and you need to quickly update a document [pdf] with a new logo.

Once you've converted the document to Word using Free PDF to Word simply open the header and copy and paste the image into your favorite image editor:

Make the changes you need and then copy and paste the result back:

This change is reflected in other parts of the document. Given that this particular document is over 20 pages long, the time saved is very noticeable.

One nice side affect of detecting and creating headers and footers when converting from PDF to Word is that the result is smaller. In this case the result from Free PDF to Word is about 1/10th the size of the result from Zamzar (357KB vs 3900KB).

What Zamzar does with Headers and Footers

When converting a PDF file to Word, headers and footers are placed in the body of the document. In their converted result of the example document you can see that the entire background has been placed as one large flat image that cannot be separately easily:

Changing the header and footer in this case requires making the same change to almost all the pages in the document.

Not using headers and footers also makes it harder to add pages to existing documents. If you add a page break to a converted Word DOC from Zamzar the result will be a blank page:

Doing the same thing with the result from our Free PDF to Word service results in a page with the same header and footer as the page above it:

Page numbers in the rest of the document are also updated automatically with the result from Free PDF to Word. Unfortunately the result from Zamzar requires manually changing each page number if you add or remove pages.

Conclusion

In this case the result from Zamzar looks very nice. If you only have to correct individual lines of text their result is quite usable.

If however you need to make significant changes to the document their converted result requires large amounts of manual corrections. When this is the case using the result from Free PDF to Word will save you time and hassle. We encourage you to try this for yourself and let us know what you think.

Credits, fine print, etc.

Thanks to GlassFish for hosting the document we used as an example. Thanks to Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart of Sun for making the document in the first place. We are not affiliated with Sun, GlassFish or Oracle.

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Scan to Microsoft® Word

2009-05-13T12:18:00.000-07:00

Solid PDF Tools offers powerful scanning features that allow users to scan multiple pages directly into one or more Word documents.

Scanning a paper document produces an image file. In order to create an editable Word document Solid PDF Tools needs to convert the images of letters into text characters. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature in Solid PDF Tools does this.

To create a Word document directly from paper, simply...

• Turn on your scanner
• Open Solid PDF Tools and click "Scan to Word".
• Select the "Scanning" options that are most suitable for your paper document.
• Set your "Output" options to Save, or Save and Open to open in Microsoft® Word.
• Click the "Scan to Word" button to start the scanning process.
• Preview your document and save.

Your Word document will open in Microsoft Word with all of it's original formatting and ready to edit.

The best candidate documents to scan back into Word are business documents that originated in Word in the first place – documents created by more complex Desktop Publishing products or that have lots of images are at the mercy of the limitations of Microsoft Word.

Comparison of Free PDF to Word Services

2009-05-01T07:35:00.000-07:00

Our Free PDF to Word service has been public for about 6 months now. Although this in and of itself is pretty neat, this kind of service isn't that uncommon.

What is uncommon about our free service is that it produces extremely accurate conversions to Word. Although you can obviously see this yourself with your own files (again, for free) comparing our free service to another free service in this post is informative.

One such service, Zamzar, has been offering free (among other file conversions) PDF to Word conversions for some time now, albeit with a few problems in the resulting Word files.

We've used a sample [PDF] from E&E Publishing which when converted demonstrates several differences between Zamzar's free PDF to Word conversions and our own. Some of the issues include:

1. Text Flow

Conversions from Zamzar always put converted text inside text boxes. This works very well for a few specific kinds of documents (e.g. invoices, forms, flyers) but is problematic when you need to make significant changes to a document.

(click for full size image)

For most documents using our default reconstruction mode that we describe as "Flowing" is much better. This creates documents the way you'd normally create them in Word and allow you to add or remove sections naturally. Add a paragraph and text below it will "flow" down, remove one and the text will flow up and fill in the missing space.

(click for full size image)

2. Images

If you're going to convert a PDF file to Word, you obviously want the images to look the same in the Word DOC as in the PDF file.

Although this isn't always possible (for example, CMYK images in a PDF file must be converted to RGB in Word) it is possible in most cases to get a very similar result in Word.

Our software does a great job of this, as you can see below:

(click for full size image)

Unfortunately the result from Zamzar has a significant reduction in image quality:

(click for full size image)

3. Tables

Putting tabular information into tables makes reformatting them much easier than putting them into text boxes.

Our Free PDF to Word site detects tables and makes real tables in the converted result:

(click for full size image)

Unfortunately Zamzar does not:

(click for full size image)

4. Rotated Text

Rotated text is a tricky feature to get right, but when you do it can make your result in Word much easier to repurpose:

(click for full size image)

Zamzar puts rotated text into multiple staggered text boxes, which unfortunately in this case may be worse than simply not converting it at all:

(click for full size image)

Conclusion

Zamzar offers a great service and we suggest people take a look at them when they need to convert one of the many file formats they support. However, for PDF to Word conversion we've found that our service does a better job and suggest that you see for yourself.

Have any questions or need assistance with the service? Let us know in our free support forums.

Zamzar Adds Text to Speech Conversions

2009-04-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

Zamzar has offered various online conversions (including PDF to Word, something our Free PDF to Word service also offers) for some time now.

Recently they added the ability to do text to speech conversions. This new feature is handy for people needing to listen to documents on their personal media players (e.g. iPod, Zune, iRiver) or any other device that can play audio.

We tried doing a free conversion at Zamzar earlier this morning and received a result in a few hours. The audio quality was decent, as it sounds like they're using the free Festival speech synthesizer. As with any free online service, your mileage may vary.

Extract Tables from Your PDF Files into Excel

2009-04-09T13:45:00.000-07:00

Do you need to get tabular data from a PDF file into Excel? No problem with Solid Converter® PDF to Word or Solid PDF Tools.

Extracting All Tables

Solid Converter PDF and Solid PDF Tools can recognize tables within PDF files even though your PDF doesn’t say “table data” in the file. Bordered and borderless tables are recognized.

To extract all tables from a PDF document into Microsoft Excel, do the following:

1. Launch Solid Converter PDF
2. File Open PDF and select the PDF file with your table data
3. Either click on the Extract Tables to Excel button

…or Document Extract Tables to Excel

Read more about how to Extract Tables here

Selective Extraction

If you just need to have a small part of a table in Excel then convert just what you need with Solid Converter PDF’s selective extraction tool.

1. Launch Solid Converter PDF
2. File Open PDF and select the PDF file with your table data
3. Activate the Select Area tool

4. Highlight your table
5. Right-click and choose Convert Selection to Excel

You can selectively extract tables, images, and text. Learn more here

New Security Concerns Raised For Google Docs

2009-03-31T14:05:00.000-07:00

Last week TechCrunch posted an interesting look at some "loopholes" found in Google Docs.

None of them seemed particularly counterintuitive to us, but Google did clarify the issue on the official Google Docs blog.

In short the issues are:

1. Images embedded in documents are not deleted when the documents are. This is to prevent links to images going bad after documents are changed or updated.

As you have to actually share the document for someone to get the URL for an image, this isn't a big deal (although it's helpful to know about it).

2. Document revisions of drawings in shared documents are made available to people you shared the document with.

This could be a little troublesome if you don't trust the person you're sharing the document with, but making a new copy of the drawing and linking to that is a good workaround for the time being, as is making a PDF file of the entire document and sharing that with them instead.

3. Finally, when you share a document and allow document invitations to be forwarded to anyone it does exactly this. They can be forwarded to anyone and do not expire when you stop sharing the document with a specific person.

To disable this feature when sharing documents in Google Docs uncheck it (in documents and presentations, it's called "invitations may be used by anyone" and in spreadsheets it's "editors can share this item").

Choosing the Right Password for your PDF file

2009-03-09T15:46:00.001-07:00

Choosing a good password for your PDF file in Solid PDF Tools Scan to PDF can be hard. However, Bruce Schneier reminds us that choosing a bad password has real-world consequences:

February 27, 2009

WIKILEAKS EDITORIAL

Wikileaks has cracked the encryption to a key document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The document, titled "NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative", details the "story" NATO representatives are to give to, and to avoid giving to, journalists.

...

The encryption password is progress, which perhaps reflects the Pentagon's desire to stay on-message, even to itself.

Although your data may not be as sensitive as NATO's, tools exist that can crack trivial passwords in a reasonable amount of time. Cracking a trivial password can take as little as hours because trivial passwords are dictionary words that are 8 characters or less. Using a strong password can take months or even years to crack.

How do you make a strong password? First, let's start off with what makes a strong password:

1. You can somehow remember it (we'll touch on this later). If you make your document inaccessible to yourself you have missed a huge point in security, that is securing the document for yourself.

2. It contains uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols.

3. It is at least 8 characters long (8-16 is good enough in many cases and 14 can be easiest if you can memorize two 7 character parts separately).

Now, how do you go about coming up with this password?

First, come up with a unique phrase you can easily remember. For an example (i.e. don't use this) we'll use:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Next, take the first (or last, or second, whatever you prefer) letter from each word:

T q b f j o t l d

Now, look for letters that can be easily swapped with numbers (in this case zero for o and one for l):

T q b f j 0 t 1 d

And finally add in a symbol or two that makes sense based on what is happening (> after quick, ^ after jumps):

T q> b f j^ 0 t 1 d

Remove the spaces and you now have a strong password:

Tq>bfj^0t1d

(Again, we recommend that you not use this example)

Once you've done this you may want to read or sing this in your head a couple times. Don't worry about being out of key; the point is that you want to memorize it the same way that you memorized the alphabet or the latest potato chip commercial. After that, start using the password frequently (once or twice a day) and it should memorize itself.

What about passwords for things you don't open regularly?

Assuming you don't have a photographic memory (most of us don't) you have two options:

1. Store the password in a utility designed to encrypt and archive passwords (such as Password Safe or Password Gorilla. Then you only need to protect one file (the encrypted archive of passwords) and memorize the password for the archive.

2. Write down the password and store it with your money.

People tend to be careful with their money, so this option is better than you might think.

Have any thoughts on this or other PDF security issues? Feel free to contact us or let us know in the comments.

Friday Fun - Bus Slogan Generator

2009-01-30T09:25:00.000-08:00

Since Solid PDF Tools Scan to Word is so much more stable and user friendly than Adobe Acrobat is we figured that expanding our marketing efforts to explain this would be a good idea:

Thanks to ruletheweb.co.uk for making the image generator we used. You can make your own bus slogan at http://ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bus.

New updates are available...

2009-01-29T14:58:00.000-08:00

Recently a computer worm, variously known as Downadup, Conficker or Kido, has infected as many as 15 million Windows computers (possibly more at the time of this writing). Although we don't yet know why this worm was written, similar worms in the past have been used for spamming, stealing credit card details and other nefarious things.

The spread of this worm cannot be blamed on Microsoft, as they released a patch for the vulnerability that the worm exploits back in October.

Unfortunately, when we provide technical support to customers we find that many of them haven't applied updates to their computers in years. Many of them also report having had to recently reformat their hard drives after a malware infection and some complain about poor security in Microsoft software.

Microsoft has gotten a lot of bad press over the years over security. Although this was justified years ago, nowadays you have a reasonable expectation that Microsoft will provide security updates for most of the flaws in their software. This typically happens before they become public, or within a few days or weeks afterwards.

What does this mean to you? If you see Windows update prompting you to install updates, do it. Now. This, combined with common sense (Don't take candy from strangers on the Internet) and an anti-malware suite, is your best defense against what the bad guys that want to do to your computer.

Thank you for reading this public service announcement, you can now get back to work (after you apply those updates). If you already have, thanks for making the Internet a safer place for everyone.

Acrobat 9 and Password Encryption in PDF Files (256-bit AES vs. 128-bit AES)

2008-12-05T07:41:00.000-08:00

One of the new features in Adobe Acrobat 9 is the ability to use 256-bit AES encryption when password protecting PDF files (instead of the 128-bit AES encryption that Solid PDF Tools Scan to PDF and Adobe Acrobat 7 and later do).

Although this does allow for much longer passwords than before (127 instead of 32), users with passwords less than 32 characters would be much better off using 128-bit AES encryption as the new encryption level makes it much easier than before for hackers to brute force passwords.

Fortunately, users of both Adobe Acrobat 9 and Solid Converter PDF to Word can simply keep using 128-bit AES encryption when password protecting files to retain the level of security they've had in the past.

Care for more technical details? Check out ZDNet and Adobe's blog posts on the subject.

Free Online PDF/A-1b Validation Service

2008-12-01T17:44:00.000-08:00

We've launched a free online service for PDF/A-1b validation.

Solid Documents is a member of the PDF/A Competence Center, a cooperation between numerous world-leading companies and experts in PDF technology. PDF/A-1b is an ISO Standard for using the PDF format for the long-term archiving of electronic documents. Not all PDF files meet this ISO 19005-1: PDF/A-1b standard.

To verify that your PDF files are PDF/A-1b compliant, go to www.validatepdfa.com. Use the simple wizard to send us your PDF files via email. Attach the PDF files you want to validate and send. Our validation software will analyze your files and email you the results.

No installation. No hassles. Instant results.

Free PDF Validator uses the industry leading PDF/A validator from Solid PDF Tools. You can find out more about Solid PDF Tools here.

Solid Alternative to Adobe® Acrobat® – Solid PDF Tools

2008-11-26T16:24:00.000-08:00

Solid PDF Tools does what most users need when creating and working with PDF files, including document security, scan to PDF, OCR for search, and PDF/A creation and validation. In addition, Solid PDF Tools leads the industry in PDF to Word conversion excellence.

A quick look at features that are in common between Solid PDF Tools and Adobe Acrobat (Standard and Pro):

View, print, and search PDF files

Create PDF documents from any application that prints

Optimize balance between quality and size depending on target audience: fonts and images

Convert Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Access files to PDF with one click

Protect PDF documents with 256-bit encryption

Apply restrictions on printing, copying, and altering PDF documents

Merge files from multiple applications into a single PDF document

Convert documents to PDF/A for archiving with easy search and retrieval

Save PDF files as Microsoft Word documents, retaining the layout, fonts, formatting, and tables, to facilitate reuse of content

WYSIWYG page level editing: insert, delete, rotate, re-arrange

Extract pages from PDF files to new PDF

Scan paper documents to PDF and automatically recognize text with optical character recognition (OCR)

Support of batch processes through scripting

Validate documents for conformance to ISO standard PDF/A-1b (Solid PDF Tools and Acrobat Pro only)

Features unique to Solid PDF Tools:

Superior document reconstruction for Save as Word: headers and footers, borderless tables, etc.

Balance size and quality of scanned paper documents using Solid CGM compression technology

Solid PDF Tools price is just $99.95, 1/3 of Adobe Acrobat Standard and 1/4 of the cost of Adobe Acrobat Pro. Thousands of users in Fortune 500 companies and government entities have already made the obvious choice and switched to Solid Documents products.

Free Online PDF to Word Conversion

2008-11-12T15:49:00.000-08:00

We've just launched a free service for free PDF to Word conversions.

To use it go to freepdftoword.org, select your conversion options and click a button to make an e-mail message appear with the settings you've chosen. Attach your PDF file and click send. Our servers will convert the file and e-mail your converted Word Document back to you.

This service uses our latest PDF to DOC technology that detects tables, creates headers and footers, performs optical text recovery, builds columns, recovers page layout and preserves text flow.

Converted documents don't have watermarks, you don't have to sign up for our newsletter and we won't sell your e-mail address to someone interested in marketing pharmaceuticals to you.

There are limits (we don't convert or e-mail files larger than 16MB at this time) and if you're working with something confidential we'd recommend looking at our desktop PDF to Word conversion software.

Our software performs the best PDF to DOC conversions of any product available and we want people to be able to see this for themselves without having to install our trial software. Please use it and let us know what you think.

Change the Default File Format in Word 2007 from .docx to .doc

2008-11-05T13:15:00.000-08:00

One thing that many users notice after upgrading to Microsoft® Office 2007 is that by default new Word documents now end in .docx instead of .doc.

Although the new file type offers many improvements over the old one, it can be troublesome to use if you work with many people that have older versions of Office. There are workarounds available from Microsoft, but it's usually easier just to send them something you know they can open.

One way to solve the problem is to simply change the default file format in Word 2007 to DOC.

To do this go into Word 2007 and click the Office Button | Word Options | Save | Save files in this format | Set this to "Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc)" and click OK.

Now you won't have to worry about whether or not your collaborators can read your files.

How to Hide (or Unhide) the Ribbon in Office 2007

2008-11-04T16:05:00.000-08:00

(or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ribbon).

Microsoft Office 2007 made significant changes to the user interface, the most visible of which is the Ribbon:

Although this does tend to be more useful than the toolbar in previous versions of Office, it's not always the most efficient way to work.

Many users with smaller screens (such as laptops) need as much vertical workspace as possible. The Ribbon can take up far too much of this precious space when all you want to do is enter and correct text.

Hiding or unhiding the Ribbon is as easy as pressing ctrl+F1 (or just double click on one of the tabs on the Ribbon, Home being a good example):

You can still use the Ribbon while it's hidden, just select a tab and the Ribbon will appear again, temporarily.

Free PDF Creator

2008-10-14T15:37:00.000-07:00

Solid PDF Creator (The best free PDF creation utility available) is now 100% free.

There is no watermark on created files, no nag screen and no expiration date. You don't need to sign up for anything or provide us with your e-mail address. We don't need to know the name of your first dog or where you went to high school.

Just download the best free PDF creator and make some great quality PDF files courtesy of Solid Documents.

Creating a PDF or PDF/A is as easy as printing.

This simple-to-use utility is a quick solution for creating PDF documents from any Windows program including Word, Excel® and PowerPoint.

Just open a document and print to the Solid PDF Creator printer driver. You can set PDF permissions, password protect your documents, optimize them for file size or image quality and archive your PDFs as ISO 19005-1 compliant PDF/A-1b files.

Why PDF/A and Solid PDF Tools are Great for Archival

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Solid Documents has participated with PDF/A Competence Center in the process of coming up with a standardized way to test the compliance of PDF/A validators and converters. The aim of the PDF/A Competence Center is to promote the exchange of information and experience in the area of long-term archiving in accordance with ISO 19005: PDF/A.

Why PDF/A is Great for Archival

PDF documents are very flexible and can contain many different kinds of information and formatting. However, while some features are required for the accurate archival of documents, others are not ideal for this purpose.

Converting PDF documents to PDF/A and validating them for the ISO 19005-1 specification is needed to help ensure that they will display and function the same way in the future as they do today.

Many Organizations Use PDF/A Files to Archive Documents

"PDF/A-1 files facilitate compliance ... for transfers of permanent records in PDF“
- NARA (US National Archives and Records Administration)

“Since September 2005, PDF / A is a stable, internationally accepted ISO standard for long-term archiving.” Translated from German.
- The University of Potsdam

“This simplifies the task of ensuring permanent usability of the documents.”
- The German National Library

Add a PDF Watermark

2008-08-25T12:08:00.001-07:00

A useful PDF creation feature of Solid Converter PDF to Word v4 is the ability to add watermarks to your PDF documents. You can choose to use existing watermarks included with our software, or create your own custom watermark using text or images.

The most common ways watermarks are utilized is to specify a status of the document such as a ‘Draft’ or ‘Confidential’. Using this feature, the recipients who view the PDF document will not mistake the document for a final version, or be made aware the material is not suitable for public viewing.

Another use for the watermarks feature would be to add your company logo or name to each page.

This action will inform the viewer where the PDF originated from and can prevent unlawful use or copyright infringement should this be a requirement.

- Add a PDF Watermark using Solid Converter PDF v4:

Open the PDF document

Select the Watermark Palette

Drag and Drop Watermark

- Add a PDF Watermark using Adobe Acrobat:

Open the PDF document

Choose Document | Add Watermark

Create Watermark

Add Watermark

To learn more about our PDF creation software please visit our PDF Creation features page for more information.

Search PDF files

2008-08-15T13:10:00.000-07:00

Using the search feature of Solid Converter PDF to Word v4 enables you to search a PDF containing text using keywords or phrases to quickly locate desired pages.

Do you have a multipage PDF document and need to locate the pages containing the budget analysis? Or perhaps you need to locate pages containing specific names or reference numbers.

Performing a search of the PDF using text keywords or phrases with Solid Converter PDF v4 will quickly locate the text in desired pages with a navigable list of results.

- Search PDF files using Solid Converter PDF v4:

Open the PDF document

Select Pages

Browse Results

- Search PDF files using Adobe Acrobat:

Open the PDF document

Select Edit | Search

Browse Results

Please note that in order to search a scanned PDF document you will need to create a searchable text layer in order to take advantage of this feature.

This can be accomplished with the Create Searchable PDF feature in our Solid PDF Tools.

To learn more about our PDF creation software please visit our PDF Creation features page for more information.

Extract PDF pages to create a new PDF

2008-08-01T14:38:00.000-07:00

With the PDF creation features of Solid Converter PDF to Word v4 you can extract a desired page or range of pages from a PDF document. You can then choose to create a new PDF document with the extracted pages.

Perhaps you have a multipage PDF document and find only certain pages are needed for your current task. Maybe a range of pages have become outdated and is not longer suited for distribution. Using the PDF page extraction feature you can choose to extract the desired pages from the PDF and create a new PDF document ready for distribution.

This task can be achieved by extracting the pages from the PDF document using Solid Converter PDF v4.

- Extract PDF pages using Solid Converter PDF v4:

Open the PDF document

Select Pages

Extract Pages

Extracted

- Extract PDF pages using Adobe Acrobat:

Open the PDF document

Select Pages

Extract Pages

Extracted

To view a feature comparison chart for all our products, please visit our PDF Creation features page for more information.