February 17th,2009 by Allan Bogh

One of the problems with basic Windows PDF document viewers is you can't save as another file format. This is most likely for copyright reasons, but what if you need to copy the contents of a PDF image document to a Word document?

I bring this up because I came across a scenario where I needed to copy a PDF to Word for a client (additionally, this could work for AutoCAD designs). The PDF contained several cross functional flow charts with no other information. Visio contained a print to PDF option in the print menu because I installed a free PDF printer called CutePDF. Once the PDF was created I could include it in an email attachment, but I also wanted to include the reduced-size images in the project documentation.

I decided to use PNG because it would offer the best compression and sharpness in Word, but there was no way to easy save the PDF as a PNG. I did some searching and found plenty of programs that I could buy for around $59, but I knew PDFs had been out for some time and the open source community must have something up their collective sleeves. I found a forum post on the topic which mentioned that GIMP could read PDF files. This was the golden ticket.

I downloaded GIMP for Windows, which I'm now pretty used to using GIMP in Ubuntu, and installed it. Because I had previously installed CutePDF I didn't need any other open source PDF software, but you may need the free GPL Ghostscript. Once installed I opened the PDF one page at a time (it was only 4 pages long) and saved each page as  a PNG. I dragged the PNG files to my Word document and resized as necessary.

This goes to show that open source solutions are as strong as proprietary paid software, could get more downloads because it's free (webpage advertising can make money), and can often be easier to use than proprietary software. Not that saving each page individually was easier than a program that can do a batch of pages, but I could very well develop a script to perform the batch job against the GIMP.