Solid PDF to Word - a better PDF converter?

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 29 April 2010 08:41

Business IT - Technology

Solid Documents has ported its PDF conversion engine to Mac OS X, and packaged it as a utility program.

Michael Cartwright, founder of Solid Documents, told iTWire that the company's core PDF conversion technology had been available for years in a Windows application and embedded in various document workflow products.

During the last year, the engine was ported to other platforms and the company decided to release a stand-alone Mac program - Solid PDF to Word.

Despite its name, the program can convert to Pages, HTML, Excel, CSV, text and RTF files as well as Word (.docx) documents.

"People don't understand what an intractable problem [PDF conversion] is," he told iTWire. When a document is output as a PDF file, all the structure disappears and so a converter has to recreate the structure by examining the layout.

For example, there's nothing in a PDF file to indicate that a footer is a footer - a converter needs to 'see' that the same or very similar text appears at the bottom of successive pages.

Three document reconstruction modes are available - see page 2.