I wrote a book on an Acorn Risc PC 600, and a friend produced a PDF and put it on CD for me. What are the disadvantages of the format? Is it possible to make a Word version for my Dell Inspiron laptop running Windows XP?
Chris Riley
PDF stands for portable document format. The idea behind this Adobe system is that you can capture a whole document, including the layout and any pictures, so that it looks the same regardless of the computer used. PDF files can also be password-protected to prevent copying, and even include DRM (digital rights management) restrictions. This can make PDFs less useful than other documents, depending on the permissions used.
There are lots of free programs that will try to convert PDF files into Word files, including Free PDF to Word Doc Converter (hellopdf.com). However, if the file is under 100MB, the Zamzar.com website is often the quickest way to do a one-off conversion.
At worst, you can usually print out a PDF document, scan the printed version with OCR (optical character recognition) software, then run it through a spell-checker. This can work reasonably well with clean text, such as a book, but may not be much good with fancy, printed brochures.
