A Handful of Free and Cheap PDF Workarounds

I hate PDF files. Portable Document Format is a benevolent monopoly by Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) , which created the format and sets the standards for its development. They distribute an Adobe Reader, free, but if you want to create and edit PDFs, you have to buy a version of its big brother, Adobe Acrobat, starting at US$299. Acrobat is a wonderfully descriptive name for the entire PDF situation. They also have a free online PDF creator, which you can upgrade with an annual subscription. There are many non-Adobe alternatives that are usually ruled out of bounds if you are working for a large organization.

Ah yes, "edit," that's where they get you. When I was writing about Hurricane Katrina and reading thousand of pages of government-created PDFs, I repeatedly banged my head on the desk because my Adobe reader won't let me highlight, cut and paste the text. This should be an option, if the file is configured correctly, but it rarely is. Instead, I followed usual procedure and copied notes as graphic cut-and-paste, and then retyped manually if I used the quote. Fun.

Lesson Learned

Oh, and PDFs make my computer crash. I don't have any scientific basis for this suspicion; it is more like a generalized belief.

Still, I got a pretty good lesson recently in why PDFs are a bad thing. I was writing a report for a government agency, which shall remain unidentified. I attached the artwork -- lots of artwork (bad idea) -- and sent the file in Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) .doc format created in OpenOffice. Then I took my dog Nicky for a walk at the beach. Then I cleaned up the kitchen. Then we played fetch on the deck. Finally, the computer gave up and announced that the e-mail was too big to send, and suggested I break it up into multiple e-mails. I deleted the photos, reconfigured Windows Live Mail to automatically break up oversize files, then resent it.

This is what happens when you perform a trivially simple computer function once in a blue moon. You forget details, in this case checking how big the Word file actually was. It was 24 megabytes, which can take forever to send. The photos were embedded in the text, and the e-mail program proceeded to bust it down into about dozen individual e-mails. The recipient may have assumed he was suffering a denial of service attack.

I couldn't reach the guy who was supposed to get the file. I resaved it as text only, and the new file was tiny. He later told me that one arrived, and he could read it. Of course, he didn't get the photos I removed, so I had to -- horrors -- go to the post office and mail him a hard copy.

Export From OpenOffice

Mr. Computer Genius should have sent him a PDF. I had forgotten that OpenOffice will export files in PDF format. I remembered that the next day. In PDF format, my report was freeze-dried from 24 megabytes to 2, mostly by automatically downsampling the artwork -- making the digital file smaller. Not bad. If you have Microsoft Office 2007, you can download a free plug-in from the Microsoft Web site that creates PDFs from all eight programs. Go to microsoft.com/downloads and search for "office 2007 pdf."

What about going in the other direction, turning a PDF into, for example, an editable Word document? Much trickier, if you don't spend $299 on Acrobat for a one-shot project. I ran into this a couple of years ago. After six months, my bank no longer keeps my transactions online, and instead makes them available in PDF format, which is utterly impossible to load into a spreadsheet for analysis. So I needed to convert it to a text file at the very least, where I apply some tricks (Google "comma delimited ASCII") to load it into a spreadsheet.

Some Freeware Options

I ended up using "Free PDF to Word Converter" (original, huh?), a good option if you only occasionally need to reconstitute a PDF. It is free, and it does run fast on your computer, unlike some of the online services like Adobe's. Unfortunately, it requires you to solve a math problem and also get a new registration key every time you use it after the first, if I recall correctly, 10 documents.

If you have a lot of documents to convert, try Solid Converter PDF -- $69 at soliddocuments.com. I liked the trial version so much I actually paid for it. That's a rare compliment from stingy old Lou.

As for other free PDF utilities, take a look at the rundown by Samer Kurdi at the excellent freeware genius.com site. His top pick among freebies is koolwire.com, an online service in which you mail your document to the site, and it sends back an editable version in rich text format. I probably shouldn't have to remind you, but just in case, there are potential security problems with shipping files elsewhere for processing, or, in the case of Free PDF to Word Converter, connecting to a remote Web site every time you convert a document.