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General => Technical Help => Topic started by: ray b on Friday 14 September 18 10:59 BST (UK)
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hello there
does any one use a free programme to convert pdf files in order edit them or in my case to use google translate for family history Danish to English I don't usually download free programmes as your never sure what comes with them. cannot however afford the full.
rayb
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hello there
does any one use a free programme to convert pdf files in order edit them or in my case to use google translate for family history Danish to English I don't usually download free programmes as your never sure what comes with them. cannot however afford the full.
rayb
I haven't come across any free software to do this. Any good DTP package should do it assuming that the PDF is storing the words as text. Anything more upmarket than the PDF converters in Word or Open Office can convert the content to an image to make resizing easier.
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I've had the same problem. I have a memory stick with lots of pdf files. Can't open them. Luckily, many have jpeg copies.
If received by e-mail Gmail pdf's are viewable.
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Ray, I just searched on the internet for "edit PDF free" and found several options. Be sure to try something from a reputable source. Another option, depending on how the PDF file was created, would just be to open the document copy the entire contents and paste it into your word processor program. Some PDFs will not allow this though.
Regorian, I didn't understand your comment about being unable to open PDF files on a memory stick. If you expand on that I might be able to help.
Martin
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Hello Martin,
I can open them in something like Notepad, but it's just code.
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I can open them in Word by right clicking on the pdf file and clicking 'Open with'.....
It might be because I have the latest version of Word though.
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Regorian although some browsers open them, ideally you need a specific PDF program. Adobe Acrobat is the most well-known, but I use one called Foxit Reader.
https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/
Martin
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You can edit PDF files in LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/) (it's the same pretty much as OpenOffice). It's a very well known and well trusted office suite which is free. It's available for PC, Linux and Mac.
Download it, and install it.
You then go into LibreOffice Draw (which is past of the Office package), press "Open", and select the PDF you wish to edit.
It then opens up the document that you can then edit.
Occasionally you will find that some PDFs are locked to editing by the use of a password. In those cases unless you have the password you will not be able to edit them using this method.
Trystan
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I got given Open Office by PC World. I hope to not have to go PC World again.
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I had heard of libre office but did not know anything about it so libre it will be
Thanks to all
rayb
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Do you have Adobe Acrobat Reader...just Edit them in that.
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If your need is specifically to be able to input Danish to Google translate, try this Danish keyboard which can be used free online. It lets you type Danish (or other languages, with accents/non English alphabets), then copy and paste the text to wherever it's needed. It works well and is simple to use.
http://danish.typeit.org/
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hello again I might not have been clear in my request a Danish relative has a book about a branch of the family this is printed in Danish he has tried to photocopy to his laptop and then translate, this did not appear to work. he thought that he could email the copy to me and maybe I could translate it myself. have now got libre and trying to work out how to import e mails
rayb
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hello again I might not have been clear in my request a Danish relative has a book about a branch of the family this is printed in Danish he has tried to photocopy to his laptop and then translate, this did not appear to work. he thought that he could email the copy to me and maybe I could translate it myself. have now got libre and trying to work out how to import e mails
rayb: It is not clear whether you are trying to import a PDF (your OP) or an email ! ! !
LibreOffice/OpenOffice has limited editing of PDF files in the Draw component, where some of
the formatting can be lost but that is a risk you must take.
You can try an online file converter ie https://pdf2doc.com/ (https://pdf2doc.com/) and convert it to doc/docx
it would then be editable in M$ Office.
The anomaly of PDF files is that they are a facsimile of an editable document not meant to
be edited by the end user.
Jim
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"The anomaly of PDF files is that they are a facsimile of an editable document not meant to
be edited by the end user."
Hardly an anomaly. That's the whole reason for pdf, so that the file does not get edited / corrupted along the way, either deliberately or accidentally.
Dawn M
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If I have understood the situation the PDF file contains scans/photocopies of book pages.
Editing the PDF will most likely produce a series of jpeg images. Once you have these you will need an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program that reads Danish to convert them into editable text, often with variable results :-\
Then you should be able to use translation software to convert them to English.
Mike.
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Two points:
1)The possibility of editing, or extracting text from a PDF document depends crucially on how the document was created. If the PDF originated from someone typing words onto a computer, for example a plain text document, a Word document or text copied/pasted from a Web page, then saved as PDF, then all the original text will be retained inside the PDF file and can be extracted by any of the methods mentioned in the replies. That includes manually selecting one or more paragraphs and copy/paste back into a new document.
But if the PDF was created by scanning pieces of paper, like pages of a newspaper or an old book, then the resulting PDF file will basically be a sequence of image files and can only be viewed or printed out as such. Generally, the way to discover which sort a PDF file is will be to open it and try to select lines of text or individual words. If that is not available then the page has been scanned as an image. That is when you would need to resort to OCR software as suggested by Mike175.
2) After that, the idea that a computer can translate a book from Danish to English is rather laughable. Yes you will see Facebook offer to translate someone's post into English (including quite often something that's already English which gives you an idea how accurate it is!) or a Web page that claims you can read it in many other languages - and you may have an idea how 'good' these translations are from google-translated Web pages from (say) German. You will see that when the software doesn't recognize a word it leaves it in the original language. That may not sound so bad - but if the un-recognized word is the main verb of the sentence, for example, the algorithm will then look for another verb to takes its place and often mess up the entire sentence.
Now consider that in that case, you will be asking the software to 'translate' the result of an OCR scan - which itself will quite probably have anything up to a third of words misinterpreted, and if you don't know much Danish you wont be able to make corrections, so you would be submitting something to the translation software that is pretty much nonsense to start with, with predictable (non) results.
If you were going to ask a human to translate, of course the PDF would be all you needed. And accepting no-one would agree to translate a whole book except as a paid job, you might know someone with enough knowledge of the language to take a quick look and tell you 'these pages are about Jan growing up on a farm, this bit is about Mikael's time in the military, there's a long piece about the state of education in the 1820s, that chapter ...' so you have an idea of the content.
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Do you have Adobe Acrobat Reader...just Edit them in that.
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You cannot edit in Adobe Acrobat Reader unless you pay a subscription fee.