The HTML format offers an alternative. While it is often not that pretty to look at it provides better controls to read and work with the text of a document. Tools like Calibre can convert pdf documents into various formats. Their disadvantage is that they often do not get it completely right, so that header, footer and other textual information are added that are not really needed to read the text.

Enter PDF Masher. The Open Source software turns pdf documents into HTML pages. Instead of relying on guesswork or an algorithm to extract text from the pdf document, it asks the user to identify and select the text that should be available in the next document.

You can load a pdf document via the Open File button at the top of the interface. PDF Masher scans the document and displays all the text that it found in a table like structure.

Displayed in the sortable table are the font size, x and y position, text length and the text itself among other data. This makes identification of text that you want included in the resulting document relatively easy. A click on a row display that row’s text in the lower half of the screen. Here it is possible to add, edit or delete text directly. That’s helpful if the automatic text detection created some mistakes that need to be corrected.

It is furthermore possible to ignore single or multiple text ids automatically so that they do not turn up in the new document.

Lines can also be set as footnotes and titles. Footnotes are for instance automatically added to the last page of the document, so that they do not appear in the document.

The developer has created a small video that demonstrates the programs functionality.

PDF Masher is a handy program for users who want better control and readability on their mobile devices. The manual conversion options may take longer than automatic conversions, but they ensure that the accessibility of the document is improved.

Users who want to convert multiple documents at once need to look at other programs for the job. If it is just one document, then PDF Masher is one the best options, provided that you are fine with the resulting HTML format.

PDF Masher is available for Mac OXS, Linux and windows operating systems. It can be downloaded from the developer website.

Batch Convert PDF to Word

This mode is probably the conversion mode that most users will pick. Just start the PDF To Word converter and select it in the wizard that is displayed on startup.

It is then possible to add pdf documents by selecting them individually on the system using the built-in file browser, or by selecting folders. All pdf documents of the selected folder are then added to the conversion queue.

A click on convert will convert all pdf documents to Word doc format, with an option to open the folder directly after the conversion has been completed by the application. The doc files are stored with the same file name as the pdf documents for easier identification.

A log is displayed in the application window which indicates success and failure of each conversion. One thing that’s really frustrating is that the PDF to Word converter installs the Boxsoft Toolbox automatically whenever the convert is started. Even worse, it launches the Toolbar and opens a related homepage whenever the user exists the program.

Command Line Conversion

Users who prefer the command line do not have these problems. The syntax to convert pdf documents to Word is the following:

PdfToWordCmd.exe "D:\in\sample1.pdf" "-d:\out1.doc"

The first directory is the source directory with the pdf document that needs to be converted, the second directory defines the output directory where the Word document will be saved to.

Benefit of this method: No spawning of the Internet page and the Toolbox program after conversions. Then again, the command line does not support batch conversions, unless users write their own batch files to convert multiple pdf documents at once.

The third option is to let the application monitor directories to convert the pdf documents that are stored in them automatically.

The quality of the pdf to word conversion is excellent, at least for the documents that we tested the application with. The developers should however strongly consider adding an disable option to the spawning of the website and Toolbox on program exit. That’s unprofessional and borderline spammy.

Users who want to try the application can download it directly from the developer page.

Extract PDF To Text is supplied as an executable and source code. Users need an account at the Code Project to download the file but the data is not verified during the registration. The tool opens a file browser upon execution. The file browser is being used to pick a pdf document from the local hard drive which will be converted into text by the program automatically and stored in the same directory.

Extract PDF To Text cannot convert multiple pdf documents at once which is why Easy Pdf to Text Extractor might be a suitable alternative for users who regularly extract multiple text documents to text or have a large amount of text documents that they want to convert to text.

Easy PDF To Text can be used to add and convert multiple pdf documents at once to text format. It basically does the same thing that Extract PDF To Text does except for the processing queue and the graphical user interface.

The output is not perfect and it does require some manual correction. The text is readable without that procedure but correcting the gaps and words that got torn apart will improve readability.

The pdf converter Graphics2PDF can convert selected bmp, jpg, gif, png and tiff images into one or several pdf documents. The interface of the software application has been reduced to the minimum. The user drags and drops images into the interface which are then displayed as thumbnails in the order of appearance in the pdf document. It is possible to change the order by using the <> keys that are visible below each image.

A click on Save PDF will convert the images into a pdf document that can be viewed with Adobe Reader or another compatible pdf reader.

The pdf converter software misses a few parameters that would increase its usefulness like options to encrypt the pdf document and to add other elements like text, copyright information or links.

No word on compatibility on the software developer’s homepage. The version ran fine on a Windows XP Service Pack 3 test system.