14 DAY TRIAL // Over the years we experimented with various methods of writing and editing texts as well as storing them in a variety of formats. Nowadays there are many specialized formats we can use to save text or images or even both at the same time, perhaps the most common of them being Portable Document Format or, simply put, PDF. The great thing about this particular type of documents is that you can make them in an environment of your own while others will be able to view the content in a totally different one. All you need is a piece of software that can read this format and you're good to go.
Even though easily created, editing them is a bit more difficult a task because there are not many free applications that anyone can easily find and use for that purpose. An option would be to independently edit either the original text or the images compiled in the Portable Document Format. Now, to do that you'll need a converter that can decode and disassemble the file in its constituent parts for later editing. Such a tool is A-PDF Text Extractor, a free application that, as its name clearly states, is designed for pulling out the textual matter from a PDF document.
What best characterizes this piece of software, starting from the installation until the extraction job is complete, is the sheer speed of operation. The accent is strong on functionality and not on looks, which becomes evident the moment you catch a glimpse of the interface of this utility. It merely sports six buttons, four of which are dedicated to the practical usage of the tool.
However spartan the GUI, A-PDF Text Extractor compensates in quality and rate of delivery. The Options tab will enable you to easily select the page range for the extraction and the type of processing you want to use. The application can grab the text from the entire document at once or from a specific set of pages. It also allows you to define the exact array or choose to decode only even or odd pages if this suits your needs.
The three available extract types offered by this utility are sufficient to yield very good results, often leaving you with little supplementary editing other than what you already had in mind. Hence, you can follow the inner order of the processed document using the “In PDF Order” setting, but you also have the alternative of rearranging the text according to its position or output the text and have the positions displayed as code in the output TXT file.
Another interesting feature is the possibility to add headers and footers to the extracted pages. Here you can include any text or numbering you want alongside several fixed variants that are: “current page number,” “all page count,” “PDF file name with full path,” “PDF file name only” and, finally, “extracting date.” To include the above mentioned options you can type in the header or footer fields the corresponding values, which are &p, &a, &f, &n and &d.
Once you configure all the settings for the text extraction, you can press the button that will grab the textual content from the loaded file and save it to a TXT document in a folder of your choice. In my opinion this is the best part of the entire process because you'll be amazed by the processing speed of this utility. To get a better idea of what this means, the time A-PDF Text Extractor needs to turn 1,214 pages of a PDF into simple text is barely over two minutes. There is however a drawback to this stunning conversion rate and, as you might have guessed, it's the large amount of system resources used. During our testing, the percentage of CPU load reached 86 with over 20 MB of physical memory in use.
There are two conditions you have to comply with in order to get the best results out of this software app. First of all, obviously, you need to have text in the PDF and not images only because the application does not have OCR capabilities and consequently it will not recognize and turn scanned characters into text. The second very important requirement is for the loaded file to have no built-in restrictions that disable text selecting. It's also worth taking into account the fact that for some PDF documents containing both text and images, the text formatting will no longer be preserved after the conversion is done.
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Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
