Some PDF to Word Converter is a free converts PDF into Word documents. It offers batch processing, a degree of customizablity for the output document, and very good overall performance. Most importantly, it is fully useable and does not require any registration or codes and does not expire within a certain time period.
I’ve previously written a comparative review free of PDF to Word DOC solutions, comprising mostly online converting services.
I concluded then that the email/online service Koolwire performed the best conversions; however in many cases a local, desktop based program is more desirable than an online service: say, for sensitive business (or other) documents, when you do not have access to an internet connection, when you simply do not want to send your documents back and forth online for whatever reason (e.g. you have a great many large size documents that you want to convert), or when the online service you are using is not responsive, which can occur frequently without explanation.
Some PDF to Word converter does a competent job in general. Here are some notes on this program:
- Handling of tables: does not convert tables; rather, the actual table structure is represented as an image, with a text window overlaid on top that lumps all text from all columns together. The treatment adopted here is not my favorite but its quite functional, given that my experience with PDF to DOC converters in general is that tables are always “worked around” in one way or another, never actually converted as such.
- Handling of images: images imported and placed where they’re supposed to be. Note that you will come across PDFs where the pages are in fact images in their entirety and will be processed simply as images, with no extractable text or other elements.
- Handling of text: what’s interesting is that Some PDF to Word Converter allows you to choose whether or not you want to use text boxes (and whether to merge these to get only a single text box); also whether or not to use line breaks. If unsure as to what you want, simply use the default settings.
- Text formatting: varies somewhat with the text handling settings used. In general quite good although in some instances will, for example, bold the entire paragraph instead of the headline. Numbered points in my test converted fine but the bullets disappeared from the bulleted test. Clickable URLs in the original PDF were not converted into clickable links in the DOC file.
- Other formatting: shading was not reproduced in the resulting document.
- Batch processing: one of the coolest thing about this program is the ability to load up a number of PDFs and perform batch-processing.
- Other settings: aside from the text processing settings already mentioned, you can remove all graphs, pics from your converted document, you can define the degree of “zoom” that the doc opens up to, and you can tell it exactly which range of pages from the original document to convert.
The verdict: this is one of only three PDF to DOC conversion programs that run locally (others being email and/or web services), and is probably the best of the three – see my comparison review for the others. I am keeping my fingers crossed that it remains free and, unlike another program that I also reviewed on this site, will not start requiring registration and/or send you to a website before you can use it.
Note: when I first tried “Some PDF to Word Converter” v1.0 it actually produced an error midway through the conversion, but that has been fixed with this newer version. Overall it is a robust product that does what it purports to do and provides very good performance generally.
Version Tested: 1.1
Compatibility: Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Internet Explorer 4.1 or later. 800×600 screen resolution.
Go to the program page for more info, or the download page to download the latest version (approx 784K).
