.PDF to whatever

Right, I have just finished setting up the scanner module on our photocopier so IT savy staff can scan old exam papers etc quickly and then send them to their personal directories as either .tiff or .pdfs
Apart from PDF2HTMLgui [ which I thought was dead ] does anyone else have any suggestions as to what software is available which can convert .pdfs to say .docs and other formats - free or otherwise - I don't paying for software if it’s any good.......

P.S. What I need is feedback of software already used - [ I know there are plenty of apps on there that do this sort of thing - I am after real life experience. ]

Since it is a photocopier scan in my experience unless your photocopier has OCR built in it just embeds the scanned image into the PDF. You may as well just save it as a TIFF file if this is the case as it will be more easily usable. I don't think that PDF2HTML would end up being much help the above situation. You will need to get a hold of a converter that includes OCR abilities to make real use of it.

I know you said you wanted real world usage tests but this may be helpful anyway:
This looks to be the leader in open source OCR for accuracy and it is directly contributed to and supported by Google.
http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

This one also supports layout analysis which keeps things like columns and formatting in line, they are looking at integrating its features into tesseract but it has not happened just yet.
http://sites.google.com/site/ocropus/

I read that OpenOffice3 will have a pdf editor. It's not released until september.

As you can export to TIFF, how about using an image converter to get into png/jpg and then upload to your VLE rather than producing a word processed document. As you want exam papers, the VLE is the way forward because you can get the VLE to mark the paper ;) The students just need to sit the exam in your moodle.

It is correcr photocopiers just make a embedded image pdf so no editing
We recently bought ecopy desktop for document management system as it intergrates with sims also. ecopy can take a pdf image or text and ocr it on the desktop very quick and acurate. We then set up a network share for copiers to save in then on ecopy you get an inbox which you link to the network folder. Price was the problem approx £200/ per workstation.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by CyberNerd

I read that OpenOffice3 will have a pdf editor. It's not released until september.

As you can export to TIFF, how about using an image converter to get into png/jpg and then upload to your VLE rather than producing a word processed document. As you want exam papers, the VLE is the way forward because you can get the VLE to mark the paper ;) The students just need to sit the exam in your moodle.

---

I shall certainly be showing the staff the options between pdf and tiff. I'll even show them using Irfanview so they can change the format should they require.
Problem is they are so used to using everything from the office suite, anything else they start to panic !!

I recall there is an MSOffice template for creating moodle quizzes:
Moodle: Modules and plugins

we use adobe professional and the inbuilt OCR to export stuff to editable word docs. The educational license for adobe pro came in about £17 i believe.