I’m waiting this for a long time. I have some good tutorial (according to myself, huh ) written in 2004-2008. The tutorial written with Open Office 1.3 and 1.4 and converted into PDF for better distribution. I provide it for free (which somehow inspired me to building Indonesian openSUSE community). I want to make an update to the tutorial regarding some software update but I don’t want too many changes and complicated task. I need an easy way to re-convert PDF document into Doc or RTF and then edit it with my Word Processor.

I have trying and using some PDF converter, including Adobe Acrobat, PDFEdit and some open source application to convert my PDF document but all the result doesn’t make me happy.

Yesterday, I found new beta service for converting PDT to Word or RTF document called PDFtoWord  provided by some guys behind the Nitro PDF Professional. PDFtoWord is an online service for converting PDF into DOC or RTF document and claims that it was The Most Accurate PDF-to-Word Converter. Is this true ? Well, it’s time to checked it whether it’s true or just a marketing gimmick.

I signup the beta service with signup code lifehackers (I heard this service from Lifehacker) and a few minutes later, I got this email :

Hi,

Thanks for applying to join the private beta for our new (and free) PDF-to-Word conversion service. The private beta program is already full, however we’ll be expanding the beta program to include you in the next few days.

We’ll be in touch shortly with details on how you can participate in the beta.

* Learn about the PDF-to-Word converter

In the meantime, for in-depth information on what our converter can do and how it works, read our detailed feature list.

http://www.pdftoword.com/features.htm

Maybe the service is not available for me now .The story ended .

But, wait, I got the second email a day later and confirmed that I could try their service because they expand the service to new beta tester.

The service provide a good navigation for their main service. Just upload your document, choose DOC or RTF file type and then provide your email address. PDFtoWord will processing the document, and then send the converted document into our email. The processing time may vary depending our document size but they limited the maximum source document size is 10 MB.

I only need a few time for processing about 1 MB document which contains some picture and text. The result was quite satisfied. I think the result is the best ever of converted document from PDF to doc or RTF. Some picture has broken alignment and some font has incorrect type but it’s all gathered successfully and text converted without problem. Although I must edit the document to make it more better, it’s enough to make me happy.

It’s the source document :

and it’s the converted document :

Another result from  Lifehacker article : PDF-to-Word Converter Pulls Readable Text from Scanned Images [Conversion]

If you want to try their service, signup using beta invite code : lifehackers. Hope the beta code tester still available to be used.

Information : PDFtoWord i’s a public and online service. If you think you would worried to send the confidential document into public service, do not do this. Please take care your decision as long as you must taken any risk regarding the threat to your document.

Beside this point, PDFtoWord has a good policy for protecting your privacy. Checked it out here.