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PDF to HTML Converter Pro is free if you act quickly enough—and here are some much-needed activation tips
April 8, 2007 | 7:53 am
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By David Rothman
You have to act in the next 19 hours to get the free PDF to HTML Converter PRO, normally about $50. Note the U.S. Eastern Daylight time stamp on this message.
Ballyhoo: “Easily make your PDF documents visible and fully searchable on the Internet, while preserving the original formatting, links, bookmarks, images, vector graphics, fonts and extended alphabet characters.” Download page is here. On my Palm TX, I could read the HTML output just fine with PalmFiction reader, and I suspect that programs such as uBook will work as well, just so you make the right tweaks within them. With PalmFiction, you’ll need to call up the Profile for your book and get rid of HTML coding. Enjoy!
Beware, though. Activation to escape the PDF converter’s annoying demo mode might be tricky. But, aided by a friend, I cracked IntraPDF‘s puzzle, and others, too, have solved it. As a start, you might experiment with placing the intradata directory in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data—if like me you have a bunch of user possibilities. When filling in the activation info, use the name of Giveawayoftheday. Obtain the registration number by opening up the key file with Windows NotePad. Shut down the conversion program. Then restart and you should be outside demo mode. When working with the program for real, you may want use the options to deselect images and other distractions and make everything a single HTML file.
More info is available from Giveaway of the Day and MobileRead.
A reminder: Remember the existence of a free alternative program for PDF-to-image conversion (different from PDF to HTML conversions). What’s more, I suspect there could well be freeware that does many of the things that PDF to HTML Converter Pro does. Anyone have tips to share?
Update: Changed at at 12:10 p.m. to include the activation tip.
Further update: From a MobileRead poster: “I’ve already got the processtext converter (only US$12) as well as the free pdftohtml, so I don’t need this anyway, but I was wondering how much spam one gets for these ‘give-aways’ generally. Call me cynical, but in my experience, there’s seldom such a thing as a free lunch.” The Giveaway site says: “The information about Giveaway of the day and the participants of this initiative will be included in our newsletters and distributed among our visitors and subscribers” and “You will get the information and special offers on all the additional software products from the given publisher.” If so, how? I did not have to register. Meanwhile processtext is here and pdftohtml is here.
And one more pointer: DearAuthor whipped up some great instructions with screenshots.
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Comments:
[...] Via Teleread.org. [...]
It seems to me that converting to HTML (or just about any other format) from PDF is highly inefficient. PDF isn’t a content-native format. The content started out in some other format (be it Word, InDesign, Quark, Illustrator, etc.) and was exported to PDF. Much like making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, each format conversion is likely to introduce small errors or inconsistencies. In most cases, you’ll get better results by converting to the desired format straight from the source file.
Preston, I couldn’t agree more—hence, my never-dying interest in e-book standards. We’re not the only ones. Just ask the good ladies at DearAuthor.com. Simply put, we’re talking about important market segments where publishers are missing out on major opportunities because of the Tower of eBabel. The ladies hate having to be format jockeys, and so do I.
PDF is a great format for printing paper copies that look just-so, but it’s rotten for plain e-reading, and even Bill McCoy at Adobe has reached that same conclusion—in his push at the IDPF for a reflowable standard that can display well on a variety of devices. I just hope that he’ll see the virtues of the OpenReader approach, a more durable standard that what the IDPF has so far.
Thanks,
David
The Java PDFBox library (www.pdfbox.org) provides a reasonably good HTML extractor, although it tries to do paragraph recognition, which the the PDF to HTML Pro product does not seem to try to do (at least in the one sample I tried it was placing each separate text chunk absolutely on the HTML page, which recreates the original presentation pretty closely but doesn’t provide any sort of useful reflow–but I was working with a somewhat strange document so it might do better on more tractable content).
The PDFBox tools are not as polished but they are free and the underlying PDF processing is quite complete and accurate. I’ve used it to do some pretty sophisticated custom PDF processing.
Cheers,
Eliot
I agree that PDF to HTML needs to offer us something decent in the paragraph rec department, but at least with PalmFiction reader, I was able to get around this and insert paragraphs in the HTML to the point where things were readable. Oh, the horrors of eBabel! Meanwhile thanks for yet another informative post, Eliot! David
I tried installing it and before it even started, it tried to access the internet and would not install until it had done some communicating to the other end. Why? What is going on here? Needless to say, I deleted it.
I find another great tool for coverting pdf fo html. PDF to HTML Batch Converter is a useful pdf tool, the converter produces fully functional HTML documents with text, pictures, graphics, table, links and bookmarks, using the original PDF document formatting, and it is more suitable for Internet publishing.
http://www.sharewarecheap.com/PDF-to-HTML-batch-converter-command-line_software_1702.html
Hi, I have read an article about pdf to html conversion at http://www.nobleatom.com. I hope it will be helpful for you. Take a look. Thanks.
quick-pdf pdf to word – also good tool for converting pdf into word http://www.quick-pdf.com/