East Carolina University
 Department of Psychology

Creating and Converting and Reading PDF Files

    PDF converters used to be essential, but not so much these days now that Word and browsers will print to PDF.  Every now and then I need use another PDF converter.  I have abandoned using the free Adobe PDF reader -- it has become simply too bloated and inefficient.  I now use the foxit PDF reader.

 

    If you don't want to spend the big bucks to get Adobe Acrobat, there are free programs that will do the conversion for you.  In December of 2011 I downloaded PDFlite after the Adobe reader refused to open a pdf credit card statement.  PDFlite read it no problem -- my printer did, however, had problems printing that document from PDFlite -- it took a minute or so to process each page.  It did not have a problem with other pdf documents, however.  PDFlite will also convert other documents to the pdf format, and it does so quickly and with no ads.

    I have used the PDF995 software, which is available at PDF995.com .  It makes you waste time reading ads.  Now that I have PDFlite, I am unlikely to use PDF995 again.

    Most free programs that convert documents to pdf format only create hot links if the text displayed in the source document is the url -- for example, http://www.flickr.com/photos/klwuensch/ would become a hot link in the pdf, but My Flickr Photos would not.  If you want the pdf to include links that are associated with text in the source document, use OpenOffice, which can be downloaded for free at http://www.openoffice.org . Bring the source document into OpenOffice (sweb or swriter for an htm document, swriter for a Word document) and then select File, Export as PDF.

    There are a number of sites that will convert pdf to Word online.  For example, http://www.pdftoword.com/ -- upload the pdf, they email the doc or rtf to you.

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Contact Information for the Webmaster,
Dr. Karl L. Wuensch

This page most recently revised on 18-January-2020.