Converting PDF's to Pages

Then you have learnt a valuable lesson in life, sometimes the too good to be true is exactly that.

PDFs are constructed of vector/text objects and bitmaps.

The text is positioned by defining a starting point and adding characters one after the other to the right. There is no such thing as text wrap, a new line is a new text object. Even a change in spacing due to manual kerning starts a new text object.

So now you may understand why pdfs are neither practical editable text nor editable DTP.

The best a programmer can do is code in some intelligent correction. Apple's Preview does a remarkable job of deciding whether parallel columns of text are horizontally or vertically contiguous, but it is not perfect, and it will have trouble telling where paragraphs start and end so assumes all lines end with a return.

People are obsessively drawn to "Convenience" and "Easy" but sometimes it just doesn't exist and chasing it wastes more time than just fixing it yourself.

I suspect there are so many pdf conversion programes because Apple probably has a framework for this in OSX, the one Preview uses, and the App Store developers are simply serving up the same soup in different tins because there is a wishful market for this.

Peter

To re-enforce Peter's comments, I have a current trial of Wondershare's PDF Converter Pro here. The bottom line is that even a simple, text-only PDF will be written to a Pages '09 document format, and afterward, you are left with considerable formatting effort. Same drill if output is to a Word .docx file.

Yes, Apple has a Quartz PDFkit developers' library that allows one to do all sorts of programming magic to create, and manipulate PDF documents.

Instead of paying someone for something that does not simplify your work flow, why not use the Automator action that strips text from a PDF file and places it in a text document. Then you can copy/paste/reformat, and probably with less cleanup work.

If you click on the Dock's Launchpad icon, you will find a Other category on the first display. Inside Other is Automator.

1. Launch Automator
2. Pick Application, and then click Choose
3. From Library Actions
   1. Files and Folders
      1. Ask for Finder Items => click and drag into the large Workflow window on the right
      2. Filter Finder Items => ditto, below the previous action
   2. PDF

      Extract PDF text => ditto, below Filter Finder Items

      1. Will output a .txt file if Plain Text is selected, or .rtf if Rich Text is selected
      2. Output filename can be same basename as original PDF with above extension added, or custom name that is/is not overwritten.
4. Automator File menu : Save

   Hide the extension. Put it on your Desktop as clickable application

5. Quit Automator

Now you have an application that will prompt you for the PDF file, verify that it is a PDF file, and then extracts and writes the PDF text to an output file. You may consider using the Rich Text option, as font attributes are retained when opened in TextEdit, and you can copy/paste from TextEdit into Pages. For time purposes, I did not extend the workflow to transform an output RTF document into a Word or Pages document, as it was not clear if you had Pages '09 available that would allow the conversion.

Finished Automator Workflow. Note that the PDF that I fed into this application was 175 pages of text and graphics that took 12 seconds to strip the text to a file. Click to enlarge.