I’m having to support a process that takes pdf documents from an outside source, convert them to postscript, then back to pdf. Reasons aside (I have zero chance of changing this requirement), our current process works, but is slow. The intermediate format that the pdfs are converted to is up to the developers, so I decided to try Aspose.Words for .NET to convert pdfs to docx then back to pdf. This process seems to be much faster, however, PDFs with user fillable fields are losing any user entered data.
Is there a way to convert a pdf to any format (I’ll take docx, ps, other?) that will keep the general layout the same and also handle user input fields? I have a license for Aspose.Words, but am open to other products if they will solve my problem.
@aspears Please note, Aspose.Words is designed to work with MS Word documents. MS Word documents are flow documents and they have structure very similar to Aspose.Words Document Object Model. On the other hand PDF documents are fixed page format documents . While loading PDF document, Aspose.Words converts Fixed Page Document structure into the Flow Document Object Model. Unfortunately, such conversion does not guaranty 100% fidelity. Also, the difference in MS Word and PDF document models does not preserve all MS Word document features after DOCX->PDF->DOCX roundtrip, the same as upon PDF->DOCX->PDF roundtrip. Fields will not be preserved after such roundtrip.
Thank you for the information. I did some additional testing, this time using ASPOSE.PDF to convert the pdf to Word, then using ASPOSE.Words to convert it back to PDF. This appears to be working better than using ASPOSE.Words for both conversions. I’ll keep testing, but I’ll still take additional suggestions!
@aspears Aspose.PDF by default converts PDF to Word in “layout preserving” mode, that means all objects are represented by floating frames. You should node that such MS Word documents are not quite convenient for editing, but such approach allows to preserve the original PDF document layout.