Some people like the Portable Document Format (PDF)
and some are not great fans. The certainty is that at some point you
will come across one to read. Not a problem because there are some good
PDF readers around. Foxit Reader, Nitro PDF, SumatraPDF to name a few, and that’s assuming you don’t want to use Adobe Reader.
If you want to edit or alter a PDF file, a popular way of doing it is
to convert the document into Microsoft Word format and then do your
editing from there.
There are a few tools around
to convert PDF documents to Word or plain text but quite a few are
either shareware or not great at the conversion with the results being
unsatisfactory. A freeware utility called First PDF
aims to make converting from PDF to other formats an easy and painless
task. Apart from the Word document conversion, it can also convert to
plain text. Something else First PDF can do is convert the document into
a variety of image formats which is very useful if you just want to
keep a few pages from a large document or place some pages onto a web
page.
The program claims to be able to keep just about all
of the formatting from the PDF during conversion, something that often
hinders this type of software. Apart from the obvious of including
images, it can also handle tables, fonts, paragraphs, bullet lists, font
face, colour and size, hyperlinks, PDF forms, edit boxes, radio
buttons, stylesheets and background colours are all transferred keeping
the output format as close to the original as possible.
First PDF is freeware and downloads as a zip file but the program is not portable and has to be installed.
The
interface is certainly nice looking and clean making the whole process
very easy. The PDF documents are loaded by pressing the ‘Select PDF’
button or dragging and dropping onto the window, multiple selections
are supported. The preview of the selected document appears on the right
and can be switched off using the tick box. The pages of the PDF can be
navigated in the preview using the arrows. I have found here that if
you have several pages, maybe 100+, then make sure not to press the
navigation arrows too quickly, let the next page load first or the
program will freeze for a short period while finding the correct page.
The output folder or filename is changed using the ‘Browse’ button.
The different output formats are changed using the ‘PDF to Word’ or ‘PDF to Images’ buttons at the top of the window. The Word section simply offers two radio buttons for ‘Word’ or ‘Text’ output. The Images section gives you a dropdown box where you can choose between Png, Jpeg, Gif, Bmp, Tiff or Multi-P Tiff. The DPI can also be set to a higher or lower level to alter the output quality.
When you are ready, click the rather hard to spot ‘GO’ button…
Overall
I would say the conversion was pretty accurate although the odd Word
file had a slight formatting or font size glitch now and again, but
nothing serious. A couple of things I did notice though was the
conversion did seem to take quite a while. An 8MB manual with 156 pages
for my TV took a while even on an i7 processor and when the same was
done on a single core CPU the program behaved like it was frozen for a
few minutes during the conversion. Do bear this in mind and let it
finish if it happens to you. Another thing noted was the very erratic
memory usage. Using the same PDF as above doing two conversions in a row
the RAM being used went through the roof and topped out over 1GB!
I
will point out that this version is the initial release of First PDF so
issues like those I have highlighted are possibly to be expected with
such a new program. The developer SautinSoft will hopefully iron out the
bugs and niggles in the near future because First PDF on the whole does
a good job at PDF converting.
If you feel like waiting for First PDF to mature a little bit before trying it out, there is also an
Online Converter which does the same thing as the program and is useful for perhaps converting smaller files.
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