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Show HN: Doc Converter – Convert PDF docs to Word documents on your computer
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- varunsharma07 4y agoIs this functionality not included with MS Word?
- ranit 4y agoThe opposite is included: doc to pdf.
- Tijdreiziger 4y agoNo, PDF to Word has been included since Word 2013. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/opening-pdfs-in-word-1d1d2acc-afa0-46ef-891d-b76bcd83d9c8 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/opening-pdfs-in-w...
- nashashmi 4y agoOpen pdf in the Word open document dialog window. It converts the document very very nicely. Better than adobe!
- voxelghost 4y agoBoth word, and Google docs can do this, the results aren't always great but the function is there. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/edit-a-pdf-b2d1d729-6b79-499a-bcdb-233379c2f63a https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/edit-a-pdf-b2d1d7...
- ranit 4y agoFrom the linked MS support document: > This works best with PDFs that are mostly text
- voxelghost 4y agoThe problem isn't really if there are lots of images or graphics, but rather that word isn't great at handling complex layouts. I somehow doubt OPs converter does much better. I hope to be proven wrong though.
- bayindirh 4y agoThe biggest problem is not Word's limitations in handling complex layouts, but PDF's complete lack of layout information.
- Digory 4y agoAnd Acrobat, if you deal with pdfs regularly.
- chungus 4y agoInteresting! I like the single payment as opposed to a subscription service. How does this compare to pandoc?
- jqr- 4y agoIt's a one year license. The FAQ is not clear on whether the software will continue working with an expired license.
- ifedapo 4y agoHi, thank you for pointing out the room for improvement on the FAQ. What it attempted to communicate is that the App will indeed stop working after the License expires, so it will have to be renewed at that point
- phonon 4y agoThat's terrible. Writing "Buy Now" is dishonest. More like "One Year License Now". Its license is also linked to the computer it was activated on. Change computers... too bad! It's particularly egregious where there don't seem to be any substantive further improvements planned, and the underlying engine was not built by you.
- ifedapo 4y agoI can see how the "Buy Now" text could be misleading. Tbh, that's just the default text that comes with the Paypal button, and it wasn't deliberated crafted that way to mislead buyers. I'll roll out an update to make it more explicit. > there don't seem to be any substantive further improvements planned About that, the truth is, it often starts with a use-case as simple as "convert PDF to Word". Improvements usually would come from user feedback, and continuous maintenance. While I deliberately started out to keep the App simple, there's a good chance that features and functionality would expand when user feedback gets in the mix. I'm saying this from my experience with maintaining IGdm (https://github.com/igdmapps/igdm https://github.com/igdmapps/igdm)
- 4y ago
- kjhughes 4y agoIs this a wrapper around pandoc? If so, it's hardly noteworthy. If you've written your own PDF to DOCX converter, then you have an interesting technical story (or ten) to tell -- do tell.
- kris_wayton 4y agoI ran it, and it installs these python extensions: Successfully installed PyMuPDF-1.21.1 fire-0.5.0 fonttools-4.38.0 lxml-4.9.2 numpy-1.24.1 opencv-python-4.7.0.68 pdf2docx-0.5.6 python-docx-0.8.11 six-1.16.0 termcolor-2.2.0
- kjhughes 4y agoThanks for checking it out for us. So, it's a wrapper around not panddoc but pdf2docx, https://github.com/dothinking/pdf2docx https://github.com/dothinking/pdf2docx which parses PDF via PyMuPDF, https://github.com/pymupdf/PyMuPDF https://github.com/pymupdf/PyMuPDF which is a wrapper around MuPDF (which does the heavy lifting parsing PDF), https://mupdf.com/ https://mupdf.com/ and writes DOCX via python-docx, https://github.com/python-openxml/python-docx https://github.com/python-openxml/python-docx
- happymellon 4y agoDo we know how this would compare to using libpdf?
- kris_wayton 4y agoI see a couple of things called libpdf...lib-pdf and libpdf++. One generates pdfs programmatically. The other parses pdfs, but generates only images. Maybe you meant something else?
- ifedapo 4y agoHmm, I haven't used libpdf to know enough, but just from glance through its documentation, it seems libpdf is more suitable for creating and reading PDF files. If this is correct, then it'll be missing the bridge to converting the read content of the PDF file to a Word document
- hardwaresofton 4y agoWhat are the chances... This is exactly the idea from the latest edition of Unvalidated Ideas[0][1] I released this week. Of course I imagined a different kinds of integrations but maybe this is a case of great minds thinking alike! [0]: https://unvalidatedideas.com/editions/latest https://unvalidatedideas.com/editions/latest [1]: https://unvalidatedideas.com/editions/39 https://unvalidatedideas.com/editions/39
- KeplerBoy 4y agoWith the small restriction that conversion from PDF is one of the few things pandoc does not do.
- jcuenod 4y agoWhat are the chances? I've just started my live beta of https://fixpdfs.com https://fixpdfs.com to convert pdfs of scanned documents/books into better "documents" with OCR, normalized margins, etc. (for better reading, searching, and highlighting)
- lhuser123 4y agoIt was my experience that OCRing scanned PDFs, would result in many small errors. For example “Alt” could be interpreted as “A|t”. Did you had those problems? How did you fixed it? What about other languages?
- jcuenod 4y agoI didn't build my own OCR models, in the beta I'm using tesseract but I'm going to use google or amazon when I start charging. There's no way to compete on OCR quality but I don't see other products automatically fixing doc scans, which is the value add I see my software really giving...
- heywhatupboys 4y agoyes, you obviously came up with the novel idea of PDF conversion!
- IvanK_net 4y agoI wrote a free PDF editor (open a PDF, edit, export a PDF), my users edit around 500,000 PDF files every month. I have been gradually improving it for the past five years. It is a part of my photo editor https://www.Photopea.com https://www.Photopea.com. I know really a lot about PDF, I wish I didn't know that much :D I am glad to see that there are others who try to "make sense" of PDF files instead of just rendering them :) ** fun fact: Often, a PDF contains text as an array of characters, each has its X and Y coordinate and a style (white characters omitted). It is up to you to "cluster" them into words, lines, paragraphs ... ** Often, PDF text is made uneditable (on purpose). You see a text "Hello", but in fact, there is a text "bsiin", and a font, which renders "b" with a shape that looks like a letter "H", "s" as "e", and so on. If you open that PDF in a PDF viewer, select "Hello" and copy-paste it elsewhere, you get "bsiin".
- soco 4y agoI also had some exposure to PDF and looking back it's almost better you'd render it then OCR on the rendered page.
- nashashmi 4y ago> render I think you meant raster
- rainbowzootsuit 4y agoPhotopea is fantastic. I don't use Photoshop enough to justify a cloud subscription and adobe has shut down the licensing service for the version I have on disc (CS3). https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/cs3-activation-server-retired/m-p/9241175 https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussio...
- Shared404 4y agoPhotopea is a great solution, and I'm both glad it exists and that you are able to solve your issues using it. But the fact that we as a society have accepted > adobe has shut down the licensing service for the version I have on disc (CS3). as something normal and acceptable is insane to me.
- aw4y 4y agois it different from https://dothinking.github.io/pdf2docx/quickstart.gui.html https://dothinking.github.io/pdf2docx/quickstart.gui.html ?
- ifedapo 4y agoVery much different yes. Doc Converter doesn't re-use any of pdf2docx's GUI feature. Doc Converter's UI is instead built with Electron.
- ss108 4y ago? Word does this itself. Does this perform this task better than Word does?
- trelane 4y agoGoing from open to proprietary formats seems to be the wrong direction.
- layer8 4y agoDocx is similarly open as PDF. (And full Adobe Acrobat compatibility is similarly difficult as full Microsoft Word compatibility. PDF has an edge here in practice because most use cases are read-only, or only very limited modification.)
- trelane 4y ago> Docx is similarly open as PDF. This is not true, as far as I can tell. > PDF has an edge here in practice because most use cases are read-only I think many folks would be extremely happy to have full-fidelity read-only access to Microsoft formats without having to have Microsoft Office. On the other side, it's _extremely_ common to both produce and consume PDF without over touching an Adobe product.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y agoIs there a possibility we will ever get a redesigned PDF format that removes so much unneeded complexity and make conversions/parsing more straightforward? Or are we stuck with this until the end of time?