e-PDF To Text Converter 2.1.0.1

e-PDF To Text Converter is a one-task conversion tool that transforms your PDF documents into editable TXT files. The program does not require you to have any Adobe product installed on your system to achieve this, and it allows you to either keep the original layout of the PDF file or to use its internal reading order to conform the text file accordingly.

Note that this tool offers no OCR support. This means that those PDF files that have been created by appending the scanned pages of printed documents will produce empty text files. What e-PDF To Text Converter does is extract the text that Adobe “hides” behind the original layout of its PDF documents. This text is not always stored following the grammatical rules of the language in question, but e-PDF is capable of “re-composing” it for you, so that the resulting TXT file is mostly readable. Thus, if the TXT file is intended for further distribution, you are advised to proof-reading it beforehand, so flaws of various kinds are most that likely to occur.

The program comes in a simple yet intuitive interface, where you can list as many PDF files as required. The settings provided will allow you to set a page range to convert, the page breaks, the end of line formats, etc. Note that any settings you select here will be applied to all the documents on the list.

A useful setting – also available in the settings dialog mentioned above – allows you to decide on the “text layout”, based on the original layout or the document’s reading order. If you choose the PDF file’s internal reading order as the preferred output, you may also encounter some unexpected results. This order is set by the corresponding Adobe product when composing the PDF file, and it is done in an automated way. This means that simple texts with none or few interruptions will output more than decent results, but documents with columns, graphs, pictures, boxes, etc., are likely to produce erratic results. Again, it would not be fair to blame e-PDF To Text Converter for this, but Adobe’s traditional despise for text in favor of a perfect layout. There are ways of customizing the reading order using Acrobat, but then again, if you have Acrobat installed on your system, you do not need a third-party conversion tool to extract the text of your PDF files.