PDF2Officev4: Recreating from a PDF Original

a review by Tom Piper

It is so easy in the Mac world to convert almost anything you can print into a Portable Document Format (PDF) . . . BUT, what about when you have a PDF from which you need the text and graphics, not to mention maintaining fonts and formatting? Fortunately, there is a wonderful solution that I started using last year, and was recently updated to version 4.

PDF2Office from Recosoft is reliable, powerful and ease to use, a perfect tool for your Mac if you do a lot of work with PDFs. I’m using the Professional version (Personal, Standard and InDesign versions also available). Fundamentally, this is a conversion tool from PDFs to Microsoft Office formats including fully editable Word, PowerPoint, and RTF, plus a bonus of AppleWorks, HTML and other files, which recreate the original construction and layout of the document. It has tremendous support from the company.

Their website (http://www.recosoft.com/products/pdf2office) summarizes PDF2Office Professional features very well. Operationally, PDF2Office forms paragraphs, applies styles, regroups independent graphics elements, extracts images, creates table, processes headers/footers, endnotes/footnotes and columns/sections, all automatically without any intervention by the user. It provides options for converting a range of pages in a PDF document into popular office format documents as well as image types such as JPEG, Photoshop, PNG and TIFF. Below is a sample  setup screen to manage output.

PDF2Office displays an easy-to-use interface that allows the user to set the target type on a file-by-file basis. To facilitate the conversion process, it even provides layout preview and navigation of a PDF document within the application itself enabling me to identify which pages to extract. I can even recover and reuse the contents stored in PDF documents making it available for use by the most popular software titles thus enhancing workflow automation and productivity. Using the Document Inspector (see below), I can view my PDF document’s meta-data and fonts.

If you are like me and wonder how it performs this recreation process, the following processes summarize what PDF2Office is doing during a conversion:

• Forms Paragraphs and applies indentations (justification is set to left or center),
• Applies text styles and retains font information (or font mapping is performed),
• Constructs Page properties such as Margins and Page breaks where appropriate,
• Interpolates Columns and Section breaks,
• Matches Headers and Footers where possible,
• Forms Endnotes/Footnotes,
• Identifies and Creates Tables,
• Regroups intersecting and overlapping Graphics,
• Processes all images (except JBIG format) and re-groups intersecting sliced images, and
• Exports images in many formatis including JPEG, JPEG 2000, TIFF, PNG, PICT, TGA, Photoshop, QuickTime Image, MacPaint, Silicon Graphics, and BMP.

As you can see, I’m very impressed with this programs features, and even more by its performance which is fast and smooth. That’s not all . . . you can also download a PowerPoint slide show for the latest PDF2Office Professional 4.0 which is a tutorial to describe its features and use . . . and, a very responsive Frequently Asked Questions section which is most helpful (which isn’t very often).

Because PDF2Office comes in a variety of forms, here is the Recosoft US price list:
• PDF2ID™ v1.1 for Mac OS X (for InDesign)    $249
• PDF2Office® Professional v4.0 for Mac OS X    $129
• (same as above) -Education Single User License      $89
• PDF2Office® Professional v4.0 for Mac OS X -Upgrade License      $59   
• PDF2Office® Personal v4.0 for Mac OS X      $59
• PDF2Office® Personal v4.0 for Mac OS X -Upgrade License      $29
There are Windows versions available, 7-day free trials from some vendors, and competitive pricing with a simple Google search.

The bottom line is that this program meets a real need, particularly in my business and personal uses. I would highly recommend it to help you get the most out of your PDF files.