Solid Documents Blog

Easily Convert PDFs to Plain Text

2009-10-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

Solid PDF Tools uses advanced document reconstruction technology to extract flowing text content from PDF documents. Document formatting is recognized to handle columns, remove headers and footers and remove graphics and images.

Right-Click functionality allows you to quickly extract a single page or multiple pages of content to plain text. Using the Pages Pane select the page or pages to be converted using Ctrl+Click or Shift+Click. Then, Right-Click and select "Extract Plain Text"...

Click to view larger image.

Other helpful features include:
• Optical Character Recognition to convert scanned pages to plain text.
• Specify the number of characters per line in your converted document (for easier reading).

By default, your extracted pages will display in your plain text editor.

Going Paperless? Organize multiple documents for your E-Fax with Solid PDF Tools for a professional looking presentation.

2009-10-19T17:01:00.000-07:00

How many times have you had to put various important documents together and make it look professional so it could be faxed?

Create one file from a multitude of other file types for upload and send

Many find themselves with a Word doc, a scanned PDF, a Tiff image and an Excel spreadsheet scattered all over their desktop. Let Solid Converter PDF and Solid PDF Tools help organize all this and more into one consistent and clean looking document that is compatible with most E-fax programs, such as Efax.com, faxitnice.com, or Metrofax.

How do you start?
You should probably begin with a cover sheet! While some of efax's available options provide a cover sheet automatically, your company may have one that is standard or you may want to make something more personal.

Since you are probably already familiar with Word, there are templates that can get you started.

You can type in your information into the document in word and print to the Solid Converter PDF or Solid PDF tools printer driver or you can drag and drop your saved company fax cover directly to the programs to convert it to PDF. If you use this method, you can use the text correction feature to edit your fax info directly into your PDF.

Let's fax an Excel invoice

Since some e-fax programs limit the kind of document you can upload, Excel documents are not always the best choice. Lets convert the invoice to a PDF too. Print it from Excel to the printer driver or drag and drop it in. Now you have two documents open in the program in separate tabs.

Do you also want to include a copy of the original purchase order .tif file you received in your efax? No problem, Solid PDF Tools can handle this too.

Simply choose the Tiff Palette from the Solid PDF Tools View menu:

Navigate to the folder where the TIFF is located and right click (or simply Drag and Drop from the palette to the workspace!)...this will import the TIFF into the program and create another PDF.

Make it all one file.

You can do this a couple of different ways - Vertical Tab groups makes it easier to see.

Since you have three documents, click the Vertical Tab toolbar button twice to get your screen to look like this:

Click the pages pane option in each vertical tab to show a thumbnail image of each page.

Now you can just drag the second and third document into the first:

If the pages are out of order, just drag them around to get them in the order you want.

Now you can close your other two documents and keep the one with all pages open. Simply save the file and it is ready to upload to your e-fax program.

You can also add other documents that are not stored electronically into the same file too. Simply use the Scan to PDF feature to scan it into Solid PDF Tools.

Maybe it isn't an e-fax you need, but a resume and job application you want to e-mail out quickly to a potential employer. A professional looking electronic portfolio is a great way to get attention. Solid PDF Tools gets the job done quickly and easily in one complete package .

"Quick View" PDFs In Your Browser

2009-10-19T09:34:00.000-07:00

Google recently added links to search results that now makes it possible to view PDFs in your browser with formatting intact. The new "Quick View" links are based on the same technology available in Google Docs and Gmail, as well as to webmasters through the Google Docs viewer. At the time of this writing Google has added "Quick View" links to more than 50% of the PDFs in their index.

Clicking the "Quick View" link will open up the PDF in your browser with graphics, formatting and tables preserved.

Once your PDF is displayed you can "Search" the document using specific keywords or phrases. Results are hi-lighted in yellow for easy recognition.

Document navigation is accomplished using the arrow buttons, the -/+ buttons or by clicking the document thumbnails which appear in the right-hand margin.

Document views include one page per screen or two pages per screen.

You can also hi-light text within the PDF and Copy|Paste that text into your favorite text editor.

Convert PDF to HTML with Solid PDF Tools v6

2009-10-06T11:04:00.000-07:00

Did you know that you can easily convert PDF documents to HTML? Using Solid Converter® PDF v6 or Solid PDF Tools v6 you can convert your PDFs into formatted W3C compliant XHTML. Using advanced document reconstruction, both products will figure out columns and remove headers, footers and images.

Open your PDF in Solid PDF Tools v6 and click the "Convert to HTML" toolbar button...

Use the Convert PDF to HTML dialog panel to set your conversion options and click "Okay"...

By default your converted file will open in your browser. It's that easy!

Solid PDF Creator Plus v6 Available

2009-09-30T13:20:00.000-07:00

Solid PDF Creator Plus v6 now includes the ability for users to specify options for creating structured PDF files from Microsoft® Word documents and other popular Office applications.

Options include:

Hyperlinks - All hyperlinks can be carried over to the new PDF file, or they can be omitted.

Bookmarks - PDF Outline bookmarks can be created according to the logical structure of the original document.

Document Information - Document Summary details in the original document can be used for the Document Information in the new PDF file.

PDF Creation From Word dialog screen. Click to view full size image.

Solid Converter PDF v6 and Solid PDF Tools v6 also include these same options for creating structured PDF documents.

Solid PDF Tools v6 Now Available

2009-09-21T10:47:00.000-07:00

Solid Documents has released version 6 of Solid PDF Tools, our popular PDF creation, conversion and archiving software. With Solid PDF Tools you can:

• Convert PDFs to PDF/A
• Validate PDF/A
• Convert PDF to MS Word
• Convert PDFs to HTML
• Convert PDFs to Text
• Convert PDF Tables to Excel
• Scan directly to MS Word
• Create PDF Bookmarks from Office
• And much more!

Per specifications from the PDF/D Consortium, version 6 now exports PDF/A validation and conversion reports. The validator and converter have also been improved to:

• provide support for XMP validation
• pass 100% of the Bavaria Test Suite cases (v5 already passed the Isartor cases)

With the improvements to our PDF/A technology, we believe version 6 is now one of the best PDF/A tools availabe on the market today. This PDF/A functionality is also available to both .NET and C++ developers through our Solid Framework SDK product.

Solid Converter PDF to Word v6 Now Available

2009-09-17T15:36:00.000-07:00

The release of Solid Converter® PDF to Word v6 represents yet another milestone in the development of our popular PDF to Word conversion software. Solid Converter PDF not only gives you the power and flexibility to get the job done, it does so at a fraction of the cost of other PDF to Word conversion products.

What’s new in Version 6? Great new features that will save you time and money.

Convert PDF to HTML. Use advanced document reconstruction to convert PDF to formatted W3C compliant XHTML. Figures out columns. Removes headers and footers and images. PDF to HTML...

Convert PDF to Text. Use advanced document reconstruction to extract flowing text content from your PDFs. Figures out columns. Removes headers and footers and images. PDF to Text...

PDF Bookmarks from Office. Automatically create PDF bookmark outlines from Word, PowerPoint, Excel or Publisher documents.

64 bit Platform Support. Solid Documents products now run seamlessly on Windows XP 64 and Windows Vista 64.

Visit our web site for a complete feature list for Version 6 or to download our FREE 2 week trial version.

Compared to other PDF conversion tools costing hundreds of dollars, Solid Converter PDF to Word v6 is only $79.95 - Buy Now and see how much time you'll save!

WYSIWYG Content Extraction

2009-09-08T16:09:00.000-07:00

With the Solid PDF Tools WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) user interface you can:

• Extract tables from PDFs directly into an Excel worksheet with a single click.
• Quickly extract vector and bitmap images from your PDF documents.

Extracting Tables to Excel
Using Shift+Click or Ctrl+Click, select the desired pages in your PDF.

Right-click and select "Extract Tables to Excel". Your tables have been extracted directly into an Excel worksheet ready for editing.

Image Extraction
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. Right-click functionality makes image extraction easy.

Extraction Settings
Selecting the "Prompt for Options" check box opens the "Extract Images" dialog screen which provides you with options for saving your images in a specific file format.

Extracted Images
Your images are now available for use.

Fast and Easy Drag and Drop PDF Creation

2009-08-24T16:09:00.000-07:00

Creating PDF Files
Solid PDF Tools can create PDF documents from most of today's popular file formats...

Simply drag and drop your file from your desktop onto the Solid PDF Tools user interface...

Working With Your New File in Solid PDF Tools
Your new PDF will be displayed in Solid PDF Tools where you can easily rearrange, delete or add pages. Add, or use pre-packaged watermarks and stamps, or optimize your document for it's intended use.

1989

2009-08-05T15:04:00.000-07:00

(or, a brief history of unarchivable document formats)

What were you doing 20 years ago? Did you work in an office? Was much of your job centered around creating or editing documents?

Let's assume it was. You may have been using a PC with an Intel 386 CPU:

This likely ran MS-DOS, possibly version 4.0. Your word processor of choice might have been Word Perfect 5.0 and Lotus 1-2-3 may have been how you kept your books balanced.

Although modern office software (i.e. Microsoft Office 2007) can import many (but not all) of the documents made by the above two programs, there is very little assurance that they will look the same as they did 20 years ago. In another 20 years who knows if the word processor you use will even be able to do that?

(WK3 files made by Lotus 1-2-3 cannot be opened by Excel 2007)

This might seem new, we've been rushing ahead with new document technologies for many years. Cheap books printed with acidic paper (common in between 1850 and 1950) have lifespans that measure decades without maintenance. Many different formats for creating and viewing Microforms were created during the 20th century, most no longer in use. Migrating from one document format to another in many cases has been expensive and time consuming. As slowing or stopping the tide of new applications seems unlikely, stable standards for document archival are needed to assure that you can find and accurately display your documents in the future.

To whom does this matter? It matters to any person or organization wishing to retain memories of their past. Will a term paper you wrote in college becomes relevant years after it is written? Will you want to read a birthday card you made or a love letter you wrote? Will a contract you've signed matter twenty years hence?

The problem is that we don't know what will become history until it is, we don't know the sentimental value of something until we've grown older and we don't who can benefit from our work until they've read it.

The solution to this, ideally, is to store as many documents as is feasible, ensure that the documents are self contained, make them easily searchable and use an open standard (like PDF) to create them. After that, make regular backups (both onsite and offsite) and and this will prepare you for the future.

(PDF/A documents will display the same way for decades, regardless of OS)

Obviously, this is easier said than done. But archiving your documents as PDF/A-1b compliant files is a good first step.

PDF/A: PDF Designed for long-term Archival

2009-08-04T11:35:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered about how today's documents might look on your computer 20 or 30 years from now? Will they look the same? Will they be viewable at all? While I can't say what might happen with other document formats, I can tell you that today's PDF files will look the same - provided they are saved as PDF/A-1b (ISO 19005-1:2005), a subset of the PDF standard designed for the long-term archival of documents.

Archive Formats
Although there are many formats available for document archival, PDF/A documents are:

• Device independent
• 100% self-containing
• Guaranteed WYSIWYG
• Archival standard approved by the ISO (International Standards Orgainzation)
• Guaranteed color reproduction
• Contains XMP Metadata
• Guaranteed accessibility across multiple platforms/systems
• Embedded fonts
• Free from proprietary constraints
• Able to capture documents logical structure
• High quality output
• Searchable text (most cases)
• Most compact file size (most cases)

Other archiving formats do not provide these same features.

PDF/A Files Are Not OS or Application Dependent
Regardless of whether or not the piece of software used to create and view a PDF/A document is still available in the future, you will still be able to accurately view PDF/A documents.

PDF/A Files Contain Metadata
20, 30 or more years from now you may have far more data than you could ever scan manually (if this isn’t already the case). Metadata can help software locate the information you need, when you need it.

PDF/A Files and Fonts
Fonts that are common on today’s computers may not be available in the future. By using PDF/A files, your fonts will look the same 30 years from now as they did the day they were created.

Using Solid PDF Tools to Create Archivable PDF/A Documents
If you have an ongoing requirement for archivable documents, Solid PDF Tools makes creating (and converting) PDF/A files easy. In Windows: Click the Start Menu | Printers and Faxes | Right click Solid PDF Tools and select Printing Preferences. In the window that appears click Compliance, select PDF/A-1b and click OK.

Each time you print to the Solid PDF Tools printer driver, the product will open with the default file type set to PDF/A.

Occasional PDF/A Creation
If you only have an occasional need to create PDF/A compliant documents you can do so by clicking the "Save As" drop down menu on the Create PDF dialog screen and selecting "PDF/A".

Viewing Your New PDF/A Document
Solid PDF Tools will create your PDF/A compliant document and open it in a PDF/A compliant Reader, such as Acrobat Reader 8.

Converting PDF Documents into Archivable PDF/A

2009-07-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

Convert PDF to PDF/A
Solid PDF Tools allows you to convert your existing PDF documents (normal or scanned) into fully searchable ISO 19005-1 compliant archivable documents. This helps to ensure that you can find the right document when you need it, and that it will appear the same way it did when you archived it.

Many organizations use PDF files to archive important documents. However, just because a document has been stored as a PDF file does not mean that it will be searchable, nor does it mean that it will look the same when viewed years after it was created.

Using Solid PDF Tools to convert your PDF files to PDF/A helps to ensure that your documents will be searchable, display reliably and be archivable.

Convert Scanned PDF to PDF/A
With Solid PDF Tools scanned images in PDF documents can be optimized for size or for accurate color reproduction. Customized optimization settings can also be used.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can be applied to scanned pages, allowing your documents to be indexed and searched.

Convert Multiple Documents
You can use Solid PDF Tools to convert multiple PDF documents to PDF/A. This allows you to easily prepare large groups of documents for archival.

ISO 19005-1 PDF/A Compliance
Solid PDF Tools automatically resolves many issues in PDF documents which prevent them from being PDF/A compliant and suitable for archival.

Examples of this include using JavaScript, using LZW compression, not including XMP metadata and not embedding fonts.

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.