Looking for a free for commercial use or open source .net library for pdf to docx conversion

Question

I've got a project that involves reading pdf files and it is turning out to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Is there a library I can use to convert the pdf to docx so I can use the OpenXml SDK to parse it?

Answer 1

AbleWord (for Windows):

AbleWord is a very capable word processing application that can read and write most popular document formats including PDF's. It is fully featured, supporting image formatting, tables, headers & footers and includes spell checking and print preview functions. Best of all it is totally free even for commercial use.

Instructions for convert PDF to Word (including docx) can be found here.

Answer 2

It appears you might achieve your requirement by parsing the contents of PDF using C#. If that's true, and what you need is mainly text, the following article discusses some free (and not so free) options for getting text from PDF: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/12445/Converting-PDF-to-Text-in-C

If you don't simply need text, but require different contents of PDF like text, images and annotations, you might have to use a professional SDK such as LEADTOOLS. (Disclaimer: I am an employee of this library's vendor). The code to extract text is this:

StringBuilder sb;
sb = new StringBuilder();
PDFDocument document = new PDFDocument("filename.pdf");
PDFParsePagesOptions options = PDFParsePagesOptions.Objects;
document.ParsePages(options, 1, -1);
foreach (PDFDocumentPage page in document.Pages)
{
   Console.WriteLine("Page #" + page.PageNumber.ToString() + " Started");
   foreach (PDFObject obj in page.Objects)
   {
      if (obj.ObjectType == PDFObjectType.Text)
      {
         if (obj.TextProperties.IsEndOfLine)
            sb.AppendLine(obj.Code.ToString());
         else
            sb.Append(obj.Code);
      }
   }
   Console.WriteLine("Page #" + page.PageNumber.ToString() + " finished");   
}
this.Text = "Finished";
textBox1.Text = sb.ToString();

Similar code (but using different flags), can be used to obtain images and other object types.

If you don't wish to parse the PDF but only convert it to DOCX, LEADTOOLS also has a DocumentConverter class that can do that.

The toolkit has a free evaluation edition that you can try before you decide whether to purchase or not.