You will see that I have posted about this before asking for suggestions on which software I can use to convert PDF to docx/odt.
I am a teacher. During my time as a researcher I wrote a lot of documents and regularly draw upon them to teach my students. I often have to take the text, modify them, or build upon them. A lot of my material is bound up in PDFs. Sometimes, I have grant applications to write where a previous draft I wrote was stored as a PDF. Converting them to text has become the bane of my life.
I am forced to use online tools because none of the software I have seem to do the trick. Lot of people keep saying pandoc. Pandoc does not convert PDF to any other format. It can only be the output format.
Is there a magic open source solution that I have missed out?
I know the pain. While there are definitely solutions that work sometimes, there’s just no “one size fits all” that I’m aware of. PDFs can represent text very differently internally.
What I did for one project where extracting the text produced a complete mess was to convert the PDF pages to images and then OCR them…
StirlingPDF is basically 1 size fits all.
Interesting, I’ll keep it in mind next time I have to deal with this problem (hopefully never but who knows).
A few years ago I was in contact with researchers that were developing an AI tool to parse PDFs (I think they didn’t care about converting to editable formats, but extracting data), from their material I got the impression that it’s extremely difficult to do right using traditional algorithms.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44287043