PDF to Word Conversion

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Mon, 9 Feb 2009 10:28:13 -0500, <Charlene_Glover at emainc.com> wrote:

>         I have been working on a manual for a while now, the manual is
>projected to be over 2000 pages to include, photographs, autocad
>drawings and diagrams. My client decided Friday that he now wants the
>entire document in word. 

As everyone else has said, this is a very, very, very Bad Idea.
Word is simply not stable enough to use for docs that size,
let alone the fact that it lacks so many common Frame features
that you will spend much of your editing time gritting your 
teeth to avoid screaming...

Ask him *why* he wants it in Word?  If it's because he wants
to edit using Word's Track Changes, fine, you can give him a
Word copy, made with Mif2Go, any time he wants one.  (Make one
Word file per chapter, *not* one file of the whole book.)
Then he can edit, send it back, and you can make his changes
into proper writing when you edit them into the Frame version.
Many of our customers use that workflow, and it works well.

>Is there anyway I could convert it to word,
>that will not be time consuming, or does anyone know any software that
>will convert a pdf to word and retain all formatting, graphics, etc. I
>tried saving the pdf as a word document, but a lot of the formatting was
>off. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Going via PDF is another Bad Idea, because PDF is, as Dov
said, a "final format", designed for print.  It is *not*
an interchange format.  Frame's native RTF export leaves
a lot behind.  Mif2Go does too, since there is nowhere to
put a lot of Frame information in Word, but what does get
there is complete, accurate, and looks remarkably like the 
Frame document it came from.  You can try the free demo at:
  http://www.omsys.com/dcl/download.htm
and see for yourself if it will work for you.

HTH!

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/