If you're distributing PDFs and want to make sure they 
cannot be edited, you have to change some security 
settings in them - first, disable the ability to select and 
copy items (perhaps, also, disable the ability to print, 
lest they print it, then scan it in and OCR it into 
editable format). Second, if it's that sensitive, you might 
want to require anyone trying to open it to enter the 
correct password. Finally, you have to set a password 
(different from any opening password)  to change 
security settings (so anyone opening it in the full 
verions of Acrobat cannot go in and change the security 
settings).

Of course, to do all that, you need to have the full 
version of Adobe Acrobat, not just the ability to 
generate a PDF from a wordprocessor - e.g., 
WordPerfect has been able to generate PDF files by 
itself since v9 without having Acrobat Distiller or 
PDFWriter installed.

The free Acrobat Reader cannot edit a PDF, but unless 
you make the security settings mentioned above, 
anyone who can open it can copy and paste.

In the full version of Acrobat, if you can open the PDF 
and clear the security settings, you can edit individual 
lines of text. It gets tedious - since it doesn't see 
paragraphs as paragraphs, you have to copy and paste 
text between individual lines instead of have it rewrap 
the text automatically.

Another way to get PDFs into editable content is to 
open it in programs like GSView, which can extract the 
text. GSView can also render PDF pages into bitmap 
graphics, from which graphics in the PDF can be 
extracted (with manual cleanup, etc).

But I've heard of non-free utilities that can convert PDFs 
to various wordprocessing formats, including RTF and 
Word. I'm pretty sure that links to them can be found at 
the PDFZone, which is a very complete and informative 
site about PDFs without Adobe's constant "sell sell sell 
our perfect product" mentality.

David
dvjones(at)ksbe.edu

On 8 Aug 2003, at 12:44, Susan Friesen wrote:

> I thought the point of PDF files was so that they couldn't
> be converted to an editable format, providing a more
> secure format for sensitive documents. It will be
> interesting to see if you find something that will do
> this. If so, then a new look at using PDF's for
> "uneditable" purposes will be warranted.
> 
> Susan
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> >
> > On 7 Aug 2003, at 20:04, Mike Hopkins wrote:
> >
> > > Does anyone know of a good FREE utility to convert
> > > PDFs to RTF or DOC format?
> >
> > I don't know if there is such a thing, but you can check
> > at the PDFZone <http://www.pdfzone.com> and search for
> > something like "convert PDF to RTF free" and see what
> > you get. I just tried it and they listed 300 hits ...
> >
> > David
> > dvjones(at)ksbe.edu
 

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