GUEST,tony -

You don't say by whom the Videoesoft Converter is "considered the best PDF Converter for you." I suspect it's "by Videosoft," and must warn you that you can't necessarily believe everything an advertiser says about a product.

Since the query was relative to converting from PDF to text, it should be noted that the only text formats listed are TXT and WORD. All the others are graphic formats that will only get you "pictures" of the pages that are useless for creating text unless you have a very good OCR program as well.

Adobe has offered a PDF converter that you can use a few times for free. You email a PDF to them, and they email a text copy back to you. I haven't looked at whether that offer is still available, but I would expect that you should be able to find it at the Adobe website.

A "best" converter, should do something like the OmniPage/Nuance PDF Converter I use, that takes either a file in any format it can read, or output directly from a scanner, and allows you to save as PDF, XPS, Word Doc, Word Forms, Excel Spreadsheets, Word Perfect Docs, Power Point Presentations, or Simple TXT, all of which are "text" files, or as JPG, PNG, or TIFF graphic files. It should also be capable of producing a "fully searchable PDF" by running full OCR, indexing all the recognizable words, and embedding the "search index" in the PDF. It should also allow you to add, remove, sort (change page order), rotate individual pages, and split documents (any of its formats) into multiple separate files, or merge multiple files in mixed formats into a single document.

Unfortunately it cost me about $90 on an "upgrade offer" from the basic "PDF maker" that came with my latest monster printer. List is at least twice that, I believe, although Nuance offers frequent "special deals." For my requirements, it was a bargain; but others may be quite satisfied with something that does only the fewer things they specifically need; and there are numerous freeware/shareware programs available to do various of the useful PDF conversion functions.

Of course you can also do nearly all of it with the Adobe Distiller, but it was around $400 the last time I looked some time ago.

John