I’ve mentioned before how very much I despise having .pdf documents come up in search results.

That’s in part because they tend to be massive gobs of poorly formatted text which makes for unpleasant viewing online. But, of course, Adobe managed to convince the government and big business to use their program by promising it would make information more accessible when, in fact, quite the opposite has occurred.

See, I do a lot of research online — a lot — and yet I cringe every time I see pdf files in the search results since I know I’m not only going to be staring at an ugly page, but that it’s going to be a useless page for the most part.

For all their promise, pdf files can be nothing but grief if you’re just interested in copying and pasting a section into the Word document you’re working with … unless you’ve got the program to convert pdf to text.

Frankly, I’m surprised I haven’t heard more about that program. Surely I’m not the only person irritated with Adobe, much less the high price of Adobe Acrobat? It shouldn’t cost that much to translate from pdf to text just so you can work with information!

Given the number of projects I’m juggling right now, I’m definitely going to be looking into this program further. There’s a 30-day fully-functional trial version, if you’re interested in checking it out, too: convert pdf2text.