Sebastiani

Hi, folks. I'm trying to find a decent conversion tool (preferably one that works 'online', but it really isn't that important). I've tried a handful of the online converters, but all have choked on the input file (it's the C++ Standard). Alternately, if someone here owns a non-free one that they'd be willing to run on it, that would work too. Here's a link to the file that needs to be converted to HTML.

Many thanks.

Mario F.

Well I tried and I gave up. Using Adobe Acrobat, it crashes when trying to export to HTML 4.01 with CSS, to HTML 3.2 or even to Word. It processes all the pages but then crashes when building the file.

Why you want to convert a perfectly decent and convenient PDF file into one thousand, three hundred and twenty six webpages is beyond me. But, I don't think I can help. That's my only PDF authoring tool and I know of no freeware tool.

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Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

cyberfish

If you can find a program to convert the PDF into images first... It's going to take quite a bit of space, though.

Sebastiani

I guess I just prefer HTML over PDF, in general. But yeah, had similar (no such) luck, even with Adobe tools. I was almost able to get gmail to translate it (you can send then view the attachment as HTML), but it produced some corrupt output in places. Grrr. Oh well.

cyberfish

Am I right to assume that you are not a web developer .

Every browser renders the same HTML document slightly differently (VERY differently in the case of IE), with different quirks. PDF is a godsend.

Sebastiani

True, but it's usually possible to find workarounds for most browser-specific ideosynchrancies (and if using a language like PHP, the user doesn't even have to have Javascript turned on). But yeah, obviously there will always be differences in display, depending on the browser and platform. On the other hand, it does give the user a much finer level of control over how the content is delivered (especially useful for accessibility issues), it's easily indexible, and - best of all - non-proprietary.

cyberfish

Last time I checked, PDF is an open standard, too (so is HTML, but it doesn't really help when IE, having 80% market share, doesn't follow the standards). At least different PDF readers render same documents almost if not identically (I have tried a few). Adobe's reference implementation obviously follows their own standard.

I believe Google indexes PDF documents, too.

Sebastiani

Good point(s), Cyberfish. I knew that Adobe had published some of their formats, but wasn't aware PDF was one of them.

Google does index/translate PDF, but the results are sometimes a little wonky. Could use a little work in certain areas.

IE does ........ me off though. Just about every compatibility issue arises from the fact that they refuse to stick to the standard, and even strive to become the de facto, which is incredibly obnoxious. That said, they are getting better (if only from all the pressure they've received over the years).

whiteflags

I used a crappy command line tool to do this. It's not the prettiest document; in fact, it's about as good as Adobe's "save as txt" feature, but it didn't explode and you can read it.

I agree that not reading the file in PDF is basically insane.

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http://www.myspace.com/whiteflags99

Sebastiani

Thanks for the link, Whiteflags - I'll check it out.