• How to convert multicolumn PDF for single column HTML for website?

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    #489696

    Looking for a PDF to TXT converter. Tried several from a Google search, but none worked as desired.
    Our club produces a newsletter in PDF format for mailing. We put a copy on the webite, but it is difficult to read. Multiple columns are fine for printed material, but to see the full page of a PDF file, the text is often too small to read. But then if you expand the text, you have to move the page up and down to follow the columns.
    I’d like to get a pure text file (with snaking columns concatenated, and no images). Then I could add HTML code as needed for a good format. A PDF to HTML converter would be OK if it does not keep the PDF layout, and makes just one column. Did I mention I hate reading PDF documents on the computer?

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    • #1397330

      What do you use to produce the newsletter? That some app can probably output something that you can maybe use, maybe even HTML. PDF is a complex thing, I doubt any converter can produce something good enough for a website.

      On the other hand, PDF is a pretty good format for reading on a computer monitor.

    • #1397738

      Don’t know whether this will be to your liking, Stan, but it worked well for me. When I ran my own web-services company, I had several clients who produced PDF newsletters, and I would provide download links onsite so that users could save the latest newsletter and print it from their computers. The easiest way to do that is to put the PDF in a folder with the same title as the newsletter but without the .pdf extension. If you were offering a newsletter with, say, the name The Bugle and your usual link to the PDF was something like bugle20130614.pdf, you’d name its folder bugle20130614. Since it has no extension a browser will recognize, the folder containing the newsletter will be automatically downloaded to the user’s computer when he or she clicks on the link.

    • #1398007

      Have the person who does the newsletter make a copy to your specs or have him/her send you the code before it was turned into a PDF and do it yourself. You could also highlight each story in the PDF file and past that into Word and then work with it.

      OpenOffice and LibreOffice will import PDF files and let you do some editing. See http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/project/pdfimport

      P.S. If the PDF file is password protected, there are free tools and web sites that will remove it.

    • #1432953

      Adobe Acrobat can export PDF’s to HTML, TXT or MS Word. Might be worthwhile investing in an older version of Acrobat Pro, like ver 9 for this purpose from a well known auction site. Mind you the resulting HTML may need some tidying up.

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