Where is the software to convert a PDF

June 1, 2007 3:58 AM

I need some software that will take a PDF file (of a magazine) and produce an online version of it that does not require a PDF reader to view.

I need to replicate the functionality of this

Ideally the answer will be an open source PHP/MySQL application

posted by ajbattrick to computers & internet (5 comments total)

PDFTOHTML is open source.
posted by furtive at 4:03 AM on June 1, 2007

SWFTOOLS can seemingly convert PDFs to Flash, haven't tried it myself though.
posted by malevolent at 4:54 AM on June 1, 2007

FlashPaper by Adobe takes a multi-page document and turns it into a Flash file that can be viewed in any browser with the Flash plugin.
posted by chrismear at 5:15 AM on June 1, 2007

If you're running Linux, you should find a handful of PDF/HTML conversion tools built in (command line).

This should do it:

pdftohtml -c filename.pdf

You'll get an HTML with elementary formatting, plus a directory full of images. You'll probably need to tidy up the formatting of the HTML. Fully automatic perfect conversion is probably impossible because it requires some intelligence to work around layout problems.
posted by humblepigeon at 5:26 AM on June 1, 2007

I assume you started with Adobe's online PDF to HTML tool?
posted by dhartung at 1:18 PM on June 1, 2007