[coopns]

I have a PDF that I need to edit. I have A Reader and I don't want to by Adobe...is there a free editor to open the doc in Word and or save as a PDF or .doc?

Thanks.

[mduell]

PDF is somewhat intentionally difficult to edit... copy and paste the text into a new Word document.

[turtle777]

Nothing free.

How much editing do you have to do ?

-t

[ghporter]

You can copy the text from a PDF using Reader and then paste it in Word. The formatting generally doesn't follow when you do this, but that may not be an issue for you. Once in Word, edit away and save your changes. Once you're finished, print to PDF (built into OS X) and you're done. While this is free (assuming you already have Word), it's a pain-formatting anything more complex than paragraphs can get to be very difficult and take lots of time. If it's not a very large document it's probably not a big deal, but anything beyond a page or two will make you understand why there are commercial products that allow you to do this sort of thing much more easily.

[TheoCryst]

OpenOffice is currently working on a PDF import option for Draw, but won't be out for some time (3.0, I believe).

[wataru]

Betas of Inkscape have PDF import capability, but I doubt it would cover your text processing needs.

[ghporter]

I should add that a lot of programs with OCR capability can import PDFs and generate output files that you can edit with Word or other word processor.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

I should add that a lot of programs with OCR capability can import PDFs and generate output files that you can edit with Word or other word processor.

Yes, but those ain't free either.

-t

[chabig]

PDF2Office is excellent, but not cheap.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

Yes, but those ain't free either.

-t

Sadly true. And pretty anti-Apple in my opinion. For example, Office Pro for Windows comes with a very functional OCR system as part of "Office Document Imaging", one of the built in Office Tools. Those are notably absent in the Office for Mac offerings...as is any form of scanner driver (also included in Office for Windows).

[red rocket]

I found a free solution. Slightly complicated, but formatting is maintained.

Step 1: Split your PDF into individual pages with PDFLab.

Step 2: Convert the individual pages into RTF with Trapeze, just drag the lot onto the app’s icon.

Step 3: Batch remove the ‘Thank you for trying Trapeze’ notice that Trapeze has inserted at the bottom of every page with TextWrangler, or Terminal.

Step 4: Make your edits.

Step 5: Batch convert the files back into PDFs with Text To PDF Converter.

Step 6: Re‑combine the individual PDFs with PDFLab or Combine PDFs.

You’re done.

P.S.: The resulting PDF was about five times larger than the original when I tried it, you may want to run the file through PDFshrink or ColorSync Utility afterwards to fix that. You could also save yourself most of these steps if you forked over the thirty dollars for Trapeze so it converts more than three pages and doesn’t insert those watermarks in the first place, but where’s the fun in that?

[-Q-]

Originally Posted by red rocket 

Step 6: Re‑combine the individual PDFs with PDFLab or Combine PDFs.

And if you have 10.5, you can also just use preview to combine PDFs. Don't know if the combined document size is better or worse that using the above, but it's an alternate method to combine them if you want to try.

[ilnli]

Try using online conversion at FreeFileConvert.Com I think they support pdf to doc conversion for free.