Description: this posting will compare a number of different possible ways to convert PDF files into Word Doc format, including freeware programs and free web and email services. Six different programs/services are tested: (1) PDF2HTMLgui, (2) the Koolwire email PDF to DOC conversion service, (3) the Zamzar web service, (4) Free PDF To Word Doc Converter, (5) Adobe PDF to HTML email conversion service, and (6) the MediaConvert web service.

In order to do this test I created a PDF document using Open Office’s export to PDF function that had the following elements (1) a two-column table with special formatting, which contained (2) three thumbnail-szied jpeg images. My PDF document also contained (3) working hyperlinks; and (4) it featured text that was bolded; (5) contained bulleted points, as well as (6) a numbered list.

For the sake of simplicity my PDF was only a single page. To see what the document looked like click on the screenshot to the right.

The objective: was to get a converted document that could be loaded into MS Word where the text/contents could be edited and subsequently saved as .DOC format, which is to say any of the following formats would be satisfactory: .DOC, .HTML, and .RTF.

Comparative results: look for them at the bottom of this positng.
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Description: WordFlashReader is an open source program that promises to increase your reading speed (of electronic texts) by multiple factors, as well as increase your comprehension of them. It will flash the words within a text in sequence (individually or in chunks) on the screen in large font, with pauses for punctuation. WordFlashReader can open and display multiple text and ebook formats.

I am 36 years old, and one of the facts of life which I have come to terms with is the following: I will never read all the books that I would like to read. In fact, I will most likely never read all the books that I have already purchased, hoping that I might someday get to them. Unlike some people (my wife, for example, who can zip through books) it simply takes me too much time to read a book; there is simply too much thinking, reflection, and daydreaming involved for me to get through texts as efficiently as I would like.

Which is why this program piqued my interest as soon as I lay eyes on it. What WordFlashReader does is open and display electronic texts such that only one word or a chunk of text is displayed in large font on a dark background at any one time. The flashing word(s) move through the text in quick succession, with some considerable degree of control allowed the user in terms of display speed, size of the displayed chunk, and the behavior of the text with regard to punctuation. This system of reading is supposed to have the following effects:

• Comfort: it is supposed to be more comfortable on the eyes than the normal method of reading. Although it takes a bit of getting used to at first, I can see that how this might be the case.
• Efficiency: because the stream of words served is constant and uninterrupted, the user is forced to keep with the pace, although he/she can control the display speed. If you are going to use the program you will be forced read in a constant and efficient manner.
• Comprehension: the program pauses for punctuation, which is supposed to increase comprehension.
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Description: ComicRack is a free comic ebook reader for CBZ, ZIP, CBR, RAR, TAR and PDF formats. It is designed as a full-feature reader with bells and whistles as well as being a manager for your library of comic ebooks and metadata. It can also convert ebooks to other ebook formats.

If you don’t know what they are, comic-book format ebooks are typically images files that are compressed into archives and displayed in a reader according to the naming sequence of the individual images (more info on comic book formats here). Comic readers are usually geared towards displaying pages/images full screen, rotating and scrolling them for the best reading experience.

ComicRack is a worthy replacement for CDisplay, the standard bearer for comic book readers (which is also free). It goes a couple of steps further in that it is not just a display engine but includes the functionality to manage your ebook collection. Here are most notes on this program:

• Bells and whistles: there are many of these, including multiple display modes (rotate, 2-page views, etc), scroll mode, information overlays, color adjustment, automatic background matching, a magnifier tool, etc.
• The user interface: is generally nice and highly customizable, but may have just too many options and tweaks to be user friendly. Supports a tabbed, explorer-style file browser that can be placed on the left, right, or bottom of the screen (or in its own window). The type of view within the browser can be customized as well in a way reminiscent of Windows’ folder views. You can even save your workspace once you arrive at a customized layout/view combo that you like or create and save multiple workspaces. See the tips and tricks page for more info.
• PDF support: supports PDF eComics (which is to say PDFs that contain images only). However ComicRack also has the ability to read any PDF provided that you install the latest version of Ghostscript as well.
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Description: Free PDF to Word Doc Converter is a small, free program that can convert PDF files into DOC files used by MS Word. It can handle all elements of a PDF document including text, shapes and images.

Note: after I first wrote this review in January of 2008, a learned a few things about it which were not initially apparent. At a certain point (or after performing a number of conversions, or this might have been added to a newer version than the one I initially looked at), the program will require that you enter a one-off code before performing a conversion. This involves visiting a web page full of ads, solving a math problem, and getting your code. Once you input the code it will perform the PDF to DOC conversion; however, the next time you need to perform a conversion, you will have to go through the whole thing. The net effect is (a) rather annoying, and (b) this prevents you from being able to use this program offline.

However, there are free PDF to DOC conversion options. See this posting entitled How to convert PDF to Word DOC for free: a comparative test

I tested this software by converting a 20-page PDF document that contained images, charts and text into DOC format. At the end of the conversion process (which took mere seconds) the DOC file was created and opened by MS Word. Here are some observations:

• Quality: the quality was generally very good. Overall the converted document looked very similar to the original.
• Program options: you can select all pages or a subset range of pages to convert; whether to retain images and shapes in the converted document; and whether or not to use “text boxes”. Choosing “text boxes” will create multiple text boxes placed all over the document rather than a single, contiguous text (see below for more on this).
• Images: Some of the images were degraded by they were all in the general vicinity of where they were supposed to be.
• Text: the text was generally handled well. In the ’create text boxes’ scenario the converted document contained dozens of text boxes placed all around the document, which more faithfully approximated the layout and structure of the original PDF (and was more manageable when loaded into Word). Converting while the ’text boxes’ option was unchecked, however, resulted in a single block of text that did not conform as well to where the text layout of the original document. (Note: if its just simple text extraction that you want, you might want to try Text Mining Tool).
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Description: "Ebook to Images" converts ebooks in most formats (.txt, .html, .htm, .lit, .pdf) to images that are custom formatted for reading on a mobile device. The idea is that while most portable devices such as MP3 players will not allow you to upload and view ebooks, many of them allow for image viewing on their screens. Hence "ebook to images" will convert the text from ebooks into images suitable for viewing on your particular portable device.

This program doesn’t print documents into images in the manner of a virtual printer (such as PDF Creator or SWF Printer Pro). Rather, it will extract the text from an ebook and reformat it as per your settings. You can tweak all aspects of the output images, including their size (resolution), the font used, font size, orientation (e.g. flip by 90°, 270°), text color, background colors, anti-aliasing and a number of other settings. You can add also a background image if you like as well as page numbering, and you can set the number of output folders to distribute the resulting images to (useful if you would like to upload separate chunks of the ebook at a time).
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Rating: 4.5

Version tested: 1.0

Description: SWF Printer Pro is a virtual printer that can convert any printable document into PDF, standalone flash presentation format (SWF), as well as JPG.

There are several freeware virtual printer programs reviewed on Freewaregenius that convert printable documents into PDFs (PrimoPDF, Bullzip PDF Printer, and PDF Creator, the latter having the ability to convert to image formats as well). What’s interesting about SWF Printer Pro is that it can convert to flash format (SWF) in addition to PDF and JPG’s. Here are some notes on this program:

• Converts anything you can print: installs as a virtual printer, and if your document allows for printing then it can be converted no matter what format it is.
• SWF navigation: you can either set a time period for transitioning the SWF flash file from one page to the next that will apply to all pages (no, you cannot set it for each page individually) or choose to wait for user input before going to the next page. In this case SWF Printer Pro provides a number of pre-set navigation buttons to choose from, and will allow you to customize the placement of these on the page.
• SWF options: you can set the size and margin of the SWF presentation, set background color for transparent areas. Other options: whether or not to set ’full screen mode’, whether or not to allow scaling/enable right click menu/allow keyboard navigation. You can even choose an audio file (MP3 or WAV) to use as background soundtrack. For some reason the resulting SWF files that I generated lacked the .SWF extension in the file names, but worked great once I added that manually into the filename.
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Rating: 4

Version tested: 1.1.42

Description: Text Mining Tool is a free program that can extract text from PDF, DOC, RTF, CHM and HTML files without needing to have any other installed programs that open these files such as MS Word or a PDF reader.

If you ever need to extract text out of any of the above mentioned file formats you can use Text Mining Tool to do so quickly and easily. All you have to do is load the source file and it will extract the text and display it for you, afterwhich you can either save the text file or copy it into the clipboard.

Of course, you can always use a free program such as OpenOffice to open and edit a number of these formats, and many PDF readers allow you to select text from the PDF file and copy it into the clipboard. However, if you don’t want to install any programs or have to open these programs and then manually go through the process of grabbing the text, Text Mining Tool can do it all for you in a single click.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.0 build 0017

Description: PDF-XChange Viewer is a free PDF viewer and editor that offers a number of useful functions including form filling, typewriter mode (for forms that were not designed for filling), the ability to add annotations and draw shapes into your PDF, as well as the ability to leave comments and embed sticky notes into the PDF document.

Alternatives to Adobe’s free PDF reader were traditionally borne out of a need to have a lean, fast-loading PDF viewing app; PDF-XChange certainly delivers on this, but it also manages to pack a large number of useful functions. Here are some notes on this program:

As a viewer: in addition to the usual viewing tools (e.g. zooming, searching text, highlighting form feeds), PDF-XChange offers Firefox style tabbed browsing, viewing all open docs as thumbnails, and bookmarking pages. The ’pan and zoom’ tool proved to be a surprisingly practical (and pleasant) navigation aide. The side pane on the left hand margin can optionally display thumbnails of individual pages of the document (it can also display bookmarked pages). Compatible with PDF documents versions 1.0 and higher.

As an editor: this is where most of the interesting features are, as follows:

• Manipulate pages: rotate your document clockwise or counterclockwise with the press of a button (a handy way to transform your document from portrait to landscape or vice versa if you wanted to). You can also delete pages and, although I wasn’t able to do it, there is an option for cropping pages (to be implemented in a future version, perhaps?).
• Form filling: fill forms easily with the form filling tool (provided the pdf document is designed form). Works really well but provides no formatting options beyond basic text (i.e. you cannot choose bold or underlined or different sized fonts).
• Typewriter tool: gives you the ability to quickly and easily overlay text on any part of the document. Especially handy when filling out a form that is not actually a PDF form. (This function alone makes this program a cut above the rest in my opinion).
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Rating: 4

Version tested: 2.3.5

Description: PDFTK Builder (a GUI for PDFTK) can merge, split, decrypt, encrypt and insert a watermark image into PDF documents.

This is a small, simple to use program that does performs the above-mentioned PDF editing operations really well.

• Merging PDF documents: you can add PDF’s singly or in batches. For each document you can specify exactly which pages you want to include (e.g. “1,3,5-10″ will include pages 1,3 and 5 through 10). You can merge landscape and portrait formatted pages within the same document. Note that you can use this same command to split a PDF into distinct chunks; for example, to split a 10-page PDF into 2 parts, select the document , choose page range 1-5, and run. Repeat for pages 6-10 and you’re done.
• Splitting a PDF document: this create a single PDF file for each page in the original document. Simply Point PDFTK Builder to your document, press ’Save’; note that all the new documents will be automatically placed in the same directory as the original file, so you might want to place the original file in the appropriate directory before you run.
• Watermarking/Inserting an image into the background: strangely, this will require a PDF as input for the image that you would want to use rather than an image file. Also, it does not offer any manipulation options for your image such as control over its transparency, size, or color. You will need to (a) manipulate your image outside of PDFTK Builder so its just the way you want it, and (b) convert it to PDF (this you can do easily using virtual PDF printer programs like PrimoPDF or PDFCreator).
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Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 2.0.003 Beta

Description: Schmap Guides are fully interactive travel guides that cover a myriad of cities across Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These freely-downloadable travel guides are available for dozens of cities and contain detailed, beautifully presented maps and photos. They also contain searchable information for the relevant city including its history, neighborhoods, entertainment, cultural offering and sites. Schmap guides provide their own offline content as well as numerous relevant online links (for example to Google maps, weather resources, Wikipedia, etc.)

Right off the bat I want to say that, even if you’re not travelling, make sure that you absolutely check out the Schmap city guide for the city that you live in (or close to) if it is available. Click here for a current list. These guides are jam-packed with interactive information that is very well presented and fun to interact with, and are a great way to explore a city. Note that there are themed packs that cover subjects like ’Romantic Getaways’, ’’The Great Outdoors’, etc. that you can download as well.

The info: the one thing which struck me immediately is the range and breadth of the information available within each Schmap guide. This ranges from the prerequisite historical and neighborhood information to detailed information about each location and event that includes picture(s), contact info (telephone, address, email, and URL), as well as an informative essay review - for each and every listed place or event! The sheer breadth of the information is one of the main underlying strengths of these guides.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.4.82

Description: Ybook is a free ebook reader that visually ’simulates’ the look and feel of an actual paperback (see screenshot) and supports TXT, HTML, RTF, PDB and PRC ebook formats. It provides a number of useful features such as bookmarking, search, and custom formatting capabilities. It can also connect to and download titles from the Project Gutenberg database of free ebooks.

Quick survey: would you rather download ebooks in PDF or TXT formats?. I am guessing that there isn’t a single person out there who would choose the latter, even as TXT files are typically much smaller than PDFs in terms of Kilobytes. The reason for this is that, even as text ebooks constitute most of the free ebooks offered (legally) on the net, they really are just text dumps of the books and do not offer much by way of formatting or visual appeal. Enter Ybook, a program that makes it much easier to work with the TXT ebooks as well as any of the other supported ebook formats. Here are some observations on this software:

• The virtual paperback concept works well. It actually makes reading an ebook easier and more straightforward.
• Bookmarks: yBook allows you to set multiple bookmarks as you go so you can easily come back to the point in the text where you left off. Also performs autobookmarking as you go along.
• Formatting: you can customize exactly how your virtual paperback will look, including font size, margins, empty lines between paragraphs, etc. If you don’t like the off-white aged paper background you can change that as well. If you don’t want the 2 panel paperback look you can use single panel mode instead.
• Clipboard: you can use yBook to read anything copied into the clipboard, or alternately copy any page into the clipboard.

Project Gutenberg: Read more »

Rating: 5 pick

Version tested:  0.9.3

Description: PDFCreator is an open source virtual printer than can convert any printable document into PDF, PNG, JPG, BMP, PCX, TIFF, PS, and EPS file formats.

Another day, another virtual PDF printer, it seems. Except this one also converts to multiple image formats: PNG, JPG, BMP, PCX, TIFF, as well as adobe Postscript (PS) and Extended Postscript (EPS). This program might well benefit from a name change, because although there are many free virtual PDF printers out there, this is possibly THE only decent truly freeware program that can also convert to image files.

This is a sophisticated virtual printer that packs a number of nice features, as follows: Read more »

I noticed some users looking for this, so here’s how to convert CBZ and CBR ebook files into PDF.

1. Rename the files so that the .CBZ and .CBR extentions are changed to .ZIP and .RAR, respectively
2. Decompress these into a folder; any of these freeware programs will do this: Extractnow, 7-Zip, TugZip, and Filzip.
3. Install a PDF virtual printer. I recommend the free PrimoPDF because it provides multiple print quality options.
4. Open the newly created folder, select all image files, and print all of these collectively. These will print in alphabetical sort order, which is exactly the order CBZ and CBR files are displayed in CDisplay and other readers; see screenshot for how you can do this. More instructions on printing images en- masse in XP can be found here. Another way to print collectively is through your image viewing program, as most support this functionality. Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  beta

Description: InFact Book Search is a web site containing over 14,000 searchable, free ebooks. Unlike most book search sites on the web, all books can be read in their entirety online, or downloaded in simple text files.

This site does not try to hook you into paying for books, nor does it contain any ads. InFact Book Search includes over all free online books from the Gutenberg Project. The books include novels, histories, poetry, short stories, dramas, kids books (including fairy tales) and many classics.

The interesting thing about this site is its proprietory search algorythm; it doesn’t just put all search terms in a bag and point you to where they’re located are when you search for them; rather, it offers offers tips for any term you search for. For example, if you search for Robin Hood, you will see tips which include other characters Robin Hood interacts with. If you click on Little John, you will be shown a list of all occurences where Robin Hood and Little John interacted together. The search algorythm also understands actions; it might find that one of the things Robin Hood does a lot is “give”, and so if you click on that verb, the search algorythm will show you all the instances in the Robin Hood books where this action takes place (see screenshot below). Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  1.8

Description: CDisplay is a program that allows you to view JPEG, PNG and GIF images that are compressed into a ZIP, RAR, ACE or RAR archive in an alphabetical sort order without having to decompress the archive. CDisplay was created as an ebook reader/viewer for .CBZ and .CBR ebook/comic book files.

CBZ and CBR files are essentially image files compressed into an archive and the extensions renamed as CBZ and CBR (for ZIP and RAR archives, respectively). The program is designed to do automatic page sizing in order to present images in the size most suited to ebook/comic book reading, whilst maintaining high image quality. Featured page sizing options are none; fit to screen, fit to width of screen, fit to width of screen if oversized, display at specific height, or display two pages. The program will also (optionally) perfrom automatic color balancing. Scrolling up or down images is done with a single keypress. Read more »