[AUTOMATOR] How to batch convert PDF to DOCX and add a new name to the generated DOCX ?

Question

Level 1

9 points

[AUTOMATOR] How to batch convert PDF to DOCX and add a new name to the generated DOCX ?

Hello!

Here is what happened:

Step1- I manually added screenshots to many different DOCX files generated in LibreOffice (See attached image: "A-FILE.docx" e "B-FILE.docx").

Step2- I used Automator (thanks VikingOSX!) to generated PDF files from all these .docx (See attached image: "A-FILE.pdf" e "B-FILE.pdf").

I have thousands of PDFs.

Now, for Step3, I need to convert all these PDFs to .docx and open it with Microsoft Word for Mac, because Microsoft Word for Mac has a great OCR and automatically converts the PDF to Text when you open a PDF using Microsoft Word, which is my ultimate goal: convert all the screenshots I took (in Step1) to Text inside a .docx file.

And because this new .docx generated from the PDF can't have the same name, as there is already a .docx created in LibreOffice in Step 1, I would need to add "-Text" to the end of the new .docx generated that will be opened with Microsoft Word for Mac.

Because I have thousands of PDFs, I kind of need a solution involving Automator I imagine.

Anyone can offer a suggestion on how to Automate this process ?

Daniel

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.2

Posted on May 17, 2021 7:28 AM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

126,764 points

May 17, 2021 8:08 AM in response to DanielP4321

It is my understanding that Word v16.31 or later can open a PDF and convert it to Word DOCX, but you won't be able to convert images in that PDF to text with Word or any other application. Automator has an action to get either the textual content of a PDF into a text or RTF file. The appending of "-Text" or "_Text" (recommended) to the basename would be a simple matter in the script or via Automator. Someone would need a current version of Word from Microsoft 365 or Office 2019 for Mac to properly test this.

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