Re: [libreoffice-users] LibreOffice Export to PDF

Peter,

I consider this important, and have struggled with this in the past.  There are a number of means 
to back convert from pdf.  Most will preserve the text, but many will not preserve the layout and 
formatting data.  A number of on line services will allow you to upload and convert to MSWord 
(.docx) and Libreoffice will read the .docx.  There are a few that work well, but we, as a rule do 
not use these services because of the widespread and rampant data harvesting from internet 
companies.  We believe there is substantial risk to sensitive personal and company information, so 
that leaves well vetted programs.

I've had reasonable success at high res, ocr scanning but color rendition is lost or distorted.  
Sourceforge and GIT offer a number of open source programs.

There is an older thread https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/how-to-convert-pdf-to-odt/12268/8 that has 
some helpful suggestions, but many are upload to internet and translate downloads.

I've used okular (KDE) on FreeBSD but formating loss is evident.

This is something I think everyone would like, but I don't know enough about the .pdf internal 
formats to know if the {odt, docx, ...} is a loss free translation or if .pdf writers lose 
formating information in the .pdf generated file.  If anyone knows where the .pdf spec is found I 
can take a look at it and see how hard it would be.  I suspect, though that since it isn't done 
well in many cases, it is not an easy back conversion to do.



Walt


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On Saturday, February 7th, 2026 at 07:12, Peter Hillier-Brook <phb@hbsys.plus.com> wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> I recently created a file consisting of 1 page, containing a 4 column
> table and exported it to PDF, foolishly failing to save the original in
> ODT. Does anyone know of a means of reversing the export to reproduce
> the original, editable ODT file?
>
> I know that this is not very important, but it would be nice if the
> possibility existed, thus avoiding the tedium of re-typing the document.
>
> Regards.
>
> Peter HB
>
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