I have received a lot of PDF documents that I wish to convert to text formats such as docx/doc/odt.

I know there are some online tools that will do it for you, but some content may be sensitive with people’s names and addresses and I’m not sure I can trust these websites.

Are there software that will convert a PDF to odt?

Things I know and tried:

  1. Asked a friend to open PDF in Microsoft Word: Their license expired last month, so it doesn’t let you save the file!

  2. Tried to do the same on my LibreWriter: It doesn’t support that format.

  3. Tried to open in LibreDraw: untenable as I want to type more things in the document.

P.S: I use Linux, but reckon solutions for platforms would be fine.

  • Max-P
    5•3 months ago

    PDFs are inherently not designed to be edited, the format lacks a lot of the information necessary for layouts to work correctly and as expected.

    That’s why you have to open it with LibreOffice Draw, and the mess you see is basically the information that’s contained within the PDF. It is just a bunch of random text cells randomly placed over the page. That makes it really difficult to get back an editable version that’s sensible. Page wraps and such will never work correctly. Your only chance at recovering it is if you can figure out what software wrote it, and how different constructs might end up when translated to PDF and a lot of heuristics.

    I believe they open a bit better in Xournal++ but it still sucks.

    Those that do build such tools realize it’s all big companies with big budgets that really have a serious need to do this, so they tend to be proprietary and expensive, and still not super great.

    I would really beg for the files to be provided in a suitable format for editing.