How to convert PDF to RTF/DOC/ODT format

**varun.net** · October 1st, 2008

Is there a program available for linux that can convert PDF to RTF/DOC/ODT format?

**Pro-reason** · October 1st, 2008

Since PDF is a final presentation format, the conversion to PDF is generally one-way (i.e. lossy).

You can, if you like, simply open the PDF in Evince, highlight all the text, and then copy and paste it into OpenOffice writer. Edit it, and save in whatever format you like.

One neat little feature in Evince is that OCR is built-in, so you can even copy and paste text from PDFs that consist of images.

**varun.net** · October 1st, 2008

Originally Posted by Pro-reason

Since PDF is a final presentation format, the conversion to PDF is generally one-way (i.e. lossy).

You can, if you like, simply open the PDF in Evince, highlight all the text, and then copy and paste it into OpenOffice writer. Edit it, and save in whatever format you like.

One neat little feature in Evince is that OCR is built-in, so you can even copy and paste text from PDFs that consist of images.

Is there any tool/scipt available that can automate the process and also convert the images. When I google pdf 2 rtf/doc I find a lot of tools but they are for windows.

I looked at xpdf which is good in converting the text but pdf2images[pdfimages] option does not work.

**varun.net** · October 1st, 2008

The pdf's that I am trying to convert are also available in postscript. Is there a way I cna convert postscript files into RTF/DOC/ODT with the images intact.

**HermanAB** · October 1st, 2008

Gimp, Abiword and Scribus can import PDF and save in a different format.

**Pro-reason** · October 2nd, 2008

If you want to convert a batch of such files, I can't think of anything but the ps2ascii command (from the ghostscript package), or pstotext. Or will lose formatting though.

What exactly is your purpose?