Convert PDF to RTF

[Daniel Lee]

Cloverleaf 5.8

AIX 6.1

I have a system that is sending us reports in PDF format.  However, the receiving system can not receive PDFs and can only receive RTF documents.  Has anyone out there written an interface to convert from PDF to RTF?  I’ve seen a post out there where someone is using ‘ghost’ and ‘ted’ to convert the other direction (RTF -> PDF) but not sure if it works in reverse and would like to find someone who’s done it before.

These PDF documents also potentially have embedded images in them.  I’m a little concerned that even if I figure out how to convert them that the images won’t come out correctly when I hop formats.

Topic

[John Parker]

Daniel,

There are several ways to programmatically convert from PDF to RTF depending on platform and use.  

For cross-platform needs or even on a server you can use OpenOffice UNO and JODConverter.  You can run this without a GUI and the programming learning curve is fairly low.   Another method is using Apache POI and IText, but the learning curve on this one is fairly high.

For Windows use I understand you can MS COM and PDFCreator and you can use it on both server and desktop applications.

A quick google should get you more info and details but I had this info in my personal wiki.

John Parker

Linux Admin

Oconee Medical Center

[Daniel Lee]

Thanks John.  That will give me someplace else to start looking.

[Daniel Lee]

Just to follow-up on this thread in case anyone runs across it in the future.  You can’t use the JODConverter as it doesn’t support ‘PDF -> anything’ conversions.  It works wonderfully going the other direction but you can’t convert from a PDF.

I was going to look into seeing if I could get tot he OpenOffice PDF Import utility via the command line somehow but am not sure if my employer will allow me to dedicate any more time to this investigation.  If I find out any more I’ll update this thread.

[Author]

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