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Any libre-friendly convrter of pdf to doc/docx/odt ? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have received a lot of PDF documents that I wish to convert to text formats such as docx/doc/odt.

I know there are some online tools that will do it for you, but some content may be sensitive with people's names and addresses and I'm not sure I can trust these websites.

Are there software that will convert a PDF to odt?

Things I know and tried:

Asked a friend to open PDF in Microsoft Word: Their license expired last month, so it doesn't let you save the file!
Tried to do the same on my LibreWriter: It doesn't support that format.
Tried to open in LibreDraw: untenable as I want to type more things in the document.

P.S: I use Linux, but reckon solutions for platforms would be fine.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

If the pdf files are properly formatted (no compression/all text selectable), you should be able to open a terminal and do (I know it works the other way around, not sure if libreoffice can actually do the reverse but it doesn't hurt to try)

libreoffice --headless --convert-to docx *.pdf

Just know that since docx is a proprietary format by microsoft, the results may be flawed. As a last resort I guess you could run a windows VM and try to convert your files with any big software known to be able to handle such files.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think docx is actually an open format now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Thanks for the information. I wasn't aware of that.