Saving documents as PDFs has become trivially easy. A huge number of PDF creator apps have emerged, most of them free, and almost all of them quite simple to use. Programs like Word 2007 and OpenOffice.org have “save as PDF” built in (you need an add-on from Microsoft to do this in Word 2007, but it’s part of the normal interface once you install the add-on). Adobe’s Acrobat.com lets you save to PDF from their word processor, Buzzword, and includes a PDF converter that will transform any document you upload to PDF.

What if you want to go the other way, though? That is, what if you want to get the text back out of a PDF so you can edit it in your normal word processor? This is quite a bit harder than creating a PDF — strange things happen to the original text when you create a PDF that make it quite difficult to pull the text and, especially, the formatting out.

Enter PDFtoWord, a free web-based service that has just begun offering its services publicly. PDFtoWord is simple — you select a PDF file on your harddrive, select whether you want the output to be a Word (.doc) file or a Rich Text Format (.rtf) file, enter your email address, and click “convert”. Within an hour or so (like I said, this kind of conversion is difficult!), PDFtoWord emails you the output of the process — a very nicely formatted and ready-to-edit word processor file.

I tried it with a copy of my e-book for students, Don’t Be Stupid, a complexly formatted document of about 80 pages, laid out into a dozen chapters and a few appendices. PDFtoWord preserved the pagination, the chapter breaks, the text formatting (though not the styles used), and every line of white space — the document I got back looked remarkably similar to the document I’d sent, far exceeding my expectations. The missing elements are things I couldn’t imagine there being a way to preserve, like the styles — I don’t know how the program could guess that all large bold text aligned right should be “Heading 3”.

So what I’m saying is that as a free service, PDFtoWord performs admirably — even better than some paid programs I’ve tried. PDFtoWord is offered by NitroPDF, which makes several other free, Web-based PDF utilities for creating and even editing PDFs, in addition to their desktop-based paid program NItroPDF Professional, which aims to be a sort of “Acrobat Lite” for creating, manipulating, editing, and combining PDF files.

PDFtoWord (free)

But as a method for drafting your ideas, using text format is good for a few reasons, including:

• Portable: It’s not only easy to work with plain text on almost any platform, it’s also small and easy to move back and forth.
• Focused: When you work with text, your focus is on developing the ideas, not what font they will appear in or whether they will be ragged-aligned or justified. Also, most text editors have few bells and whistles to distract you.

However, most people used to working in a word processor are used to having a number of facilities at their disposal, including the following:

• Formatting (bold, italics, etc…)
• Spell checker
• Search
• Compare (with another document)

Let’s introduce a couple of tools that will allow you to perform some of the above functions on text files that you have.

Formatting

I’ve recently discovered an excellent application that allows you to apply formatting to plain text. “txt2tags” consists of two tools: text-based tags that you apply to your writing, and a tool that you run to transform your tagged text into other formats. You can be fairly productive with txt2tags knowing only a couple of tags, as follows:

• Bolded text is enclosed in double asterisks: “**”
• Italicized text is enclosed in double slashes: “//”
• Underlined text is enclosed in double underscores: “__”
• Bulleted lists begin with a minus-sign and a space: “”- “”
• Numbered lists begin with a plus-sign and a space: “”+ “”
• Headers are enclosed in a number of equals signs equivalent to its level (e.g., and level-2 header would be enclosed by double-equal-signs, and be the same as an “<h2>” tag in HTML): “==”

As an example, I’ve drafted the two posts, “Moving to Linux: Tools for Writers” and this post, in the kate editor, using txt2tags. This way I don’t have to worry about HTML tagging or style sheets while I’m drafting, yet I can easily convert this to HTML for posting into WordPress. To convert to HTML, you need only run a simple tool from the command line:

txt2tags -t html yourfile.txt

In this case, the addition of “-t html” tells the program to convert the file to “type HTML.” Once this is done, you should end up with a nicely formatted HTML document. For a fuller explanation of this tool, visit the excellent “cheat sheet” page at http://littlergirl.googlepages.com/txt2tagsCheatSheet.html.

Spell Checker

In addition to this rudimentary formatting, you are also able to spell check the drafts you’ve done in text format using tools in Linux. The text editor you are using may have this function built-in; if it does, it is likely that it is using the aspell library and programs, which are commonly installed by default on most Linux distributions. You need not look for one of these that has it built-in, however, as you are always able to run this program from the command line.

For those who are (still) unfamiliar with this concept, the command line in Linux is akin to DOS. Many consider the command line to be archaic and unnecessary. But there are many actions that are easier, more powerful, or both, when executed from the command line. This is true for Windows, but (at least) doubly so for Linux.

Using the aspell program is simple as creating a text file and entering the following command (on a side note, we’ll get around to introducing you to the command prompt, and enter shell commands, in a later post):

aspell check yourfile.txt

The program then enters the aspell interface, which will walk through any misspelled words in the file, and give you options to revise them. You select your action through key presses. For example, I fixed the misspelled word in the file below by pressing “1.” aspell replaced the word, and saved a copy of the old file (with the misspelled word) with a “.bak” extension.

checking in aspell

By adding the above two tools to a descent text editor, you will have a good start on a plain text writers toolkit for the Linux platform. In the next post, we’ll explore going beyond the current document and look at searching and comparing across two or more documents (or directories filled with documents) with a few more command-line tools.

Regular readers have seen me rave about Adobe’s online word processor Buzzword before. Written in Flash, Buzzword provides a writing environment so slick that it’s actually inspired me to write more!

This week, Adobe launched Acrobat.com, folding Buzzword and a couple of other projects they’ve been working on into a somewhat integrated interface. The total package represents a nice start to what looks set to become a major player in the office suite field.

Overview of Acrobat.com

Acrobat.com is a free service offered by Adobe consisting, at this point, of 5 sub-applications: Buzzword, the online word processor; ConnectNow, an online meeting space; Create PDF, a file conversion application; Share, a file sharing system; and My Files, an online storage space. All the programs run in Flash, as you’d expect this being Adobe and all, and should run in any modern web browser (including Firefox 3) and on either Windows, Mac, or Linux (although Linux users will have to follow special instructions to upload files to the service).

All of the services are technically still in Beta, although I’ve been using Buzzword for well over half a year with no problems. Since the applications in Acrobat.com consist of a mix of acquired third-party applications and apps developed in-house, the integration between them isn’t very consistent — for example, you still can’t access Buzzword documents directly from Share or MyFiles, a feature I hope is in the works.

To use Acrobat.com, you need a free Adobe account. If you already use Adobe’s other services, like Adobe Exchange (Adobe’s repository for add-ons for Creative Studio apps like Photoshop and Illustrator), you already have an Adobe ID. If, like me, you are a former Buzzword user, Acrobat.com will walk you through the process of converting your former login into an Adobe ID — it only takes a few seconds.

The Applications

Like I said, Acrobat.com consists — for now — of five separate applications:

• Buzzword: A gorgeously-designed word processor, Buzzword offers features about on par with a rich text editor like Wordpad, such as tables, images, bulleted lists, and text formatting and highlighting. Documents can be shared, with the author deciding whether others can only read the document, annotate it, or edit it directly.

  With the release of Acrobat.com, Buzzword gains the ability to export as PDF, which it does very well (this is Adobe, after all). Still lacking is support for standard fonts (the system comes with several custom Adobe fonts, which are beautiful, but are replaced by boring fonts when you export a document from the system) which is supposedly in the works. Also somewhat disappointing is the fact that you can’t, as yet, save Buzzword documents to your MyFiles or Share account — you have to download the document (losing your gorgeous fonts in the process) and re-upload it to those services.

• ConnectNow: A fairly full-featured webconferencing app, ConnectNow allows you to share your screen, chat, send live video, share files, and collaborate using a whiteboard. Each meeting space is assigned a unique URL that you can invite attendees to visit; email invites can also be sent from within the system, but that just triggers your default email program to open a new email with the link already inserted.

  Some form of contact management would be nice, so a list of potential attendees could be consulted and invited quickly. Meetings are limited to three people, including the host, which rather limits the usefulness of the app, but I assume Adobe will increase that limit as the system becomes better established.

• Create PDF: This does about what it says. You can upload up to 5 documents, and Adobe will convert them to PDF. The conversion is straight across; you can’t add new features, edit tet, or do anything else. In other words, this is not a replacement for Acrobat.Actually, the Create PDF apps is just a quick link into the PDF conversion screen in Share; your shared documents will appear at the bottom, and the new PDFs will be saved to the Share system.
• Share: Acrobat.com’s document sharing service offers a slick way to send and receive documents. Documents you’ve uploaded or received via Share can be previewed online (although I found it couldn’t preview Word 2007’s .docx format); a button click opens the Create PDF dialogue for quick conversion; you can generate a direct link to any document that can be opened by anyone; and documents can be embedded into web pages.
• MyFiles: Adobe’s file storage service offers 5 GB of free online storage for most kinds of documents and images, Adobe product filetypes (including Flash), and zip archives. You can’t upload media files, fonts, executables, and several other file types.The options available in MyFiles are exactly the same as those in Share, which makes me curious about why they are presented as two separate apps.

Acrobat.com On the AIR

Acrobat.com finally brings offline functionality to apps like Buzzword, via Adobe’s AIR toolset. The Acrobat.com AIR application allows you to use Acrobat.com apps without using your browser, making for a quicker overall experience. SInce the app is running on your desktop, you can drag and drop files directly to MyFiles or Share. It’s unclear, though, whether you can use the AIR application without an Internet connection (and I’m too lazy to disconnect mine and see!) and whether that’s a feature that could be enabled.

In my tests, though, Buzzword opened in a separate browser window, rather than within the AIR application. Hopefully that will be worked out soon!

Overall Thoughts

Acrobat.com is a good next step for Adobe. I’m glad to finally be able to save PDFs from Buzzword, and the AIR application makes Buzzword an especially compelling word processor for everyday use.

What I hope is that this “next step” isn’t Adobe’s “last step”. Acrobat.com has the potential to be an amazing online/off-line, available anywhere, full-featured productivity suite. The addition of a presentation designer (SlideRocket?), database program (Blist?), and spreadsheet (Blist, again?), plus a couple of other niceties would make Acrobat.com a real contender against the bulky and expensive MS Office — and even against OpenOffice.org’s free suite.

For now, Buzzword and the 5 GB of free storage offered by MyFiles are more than compelling on their own. The sharing works well, though I’ve had little occasion to use it (email works fine for me, as it happens). It’s so easy to create a PDF from just about any file these days that the Create PDF service is hardly necessary, though it’s nice to have the ability built in across the Acrobat.com suite. All in all, Acrobat.com is a beautiful, elegant suite that’s still a little random and haphazard but seems to be coming together nicely. I expect great things!