For those who don’t know what iLovePDF is, it basically allows you to convert a literal equal copy of PDF into docx or a format more suited towards editing on LibreOffice/OpenOffice and some other things related to PDF, rarely losing some visual formatting when it does its usually related to the font but its not so often
theres PDFDing but its not as actively maintained as StirlingPDF
Last commit on PdfDing: 21. April 2025
Damn, thats some high standards
i didnt say its not actively maintained as it would be subjective standard posed by me. i said “not as actively maintained as StirlingPDF” that implies a standard posed by StirlingPDF
Oh, sorry. My head read that as two sentences
no worries, mate. at least now it’s been cleared up, no one is perfect. i would never judge a opensource software i just said that to make it clear because some people see projects more actively maintained as a sign of constant bug/security fixes which implies higher stability and some people dont like to have to tweak things even a bit (which i totally get, not everyone is capable or some are and just dont have the time) so i pointed it out that but i wanted to still bring light about PDFDing as i see it another interesting software to the purposes asked in this topic, maybe someone with time might use it and end up helping report bugs to the devs but i know not everyone has time for it
LibeOffice Writer opens pdf’s just fine. Just save it as odt afterwards. Probably can’t do complex pdf’s this way, but in that case you shouldn’t really convert the pdf anyway as it will almost always loose some of the formatting or layout in the process.
its not as effective as StirlingPDF, people using iLovePDF usually need it because they have to edit a PDF with customized footer/upper part of the page and just opening with LibreOffice Writer definitely will not maintain that. keeping the content and format are two different things, so if you are just opening a simple PDF without much formatting then yes maybe you dont need something like StirlingPDF and just directly opening with LibreOffice Writer will suffice
Oh I never knew this!
Hm, it might not be as useful as I thought. Just tried it. It seems it wants to save them as “drawings”, because even though I chose to open in LibreOffice Writer, it opens it in LibreOffice Draw. My bad.
Maybe they could improve this in the future but this and formatting not maintaining on opening PDFs is why many resort to other tools, StirlingPDF is opensource so I guess they could try finding similar solutions to opening PDF as is with all the formatting. You can force open with LibreOffice Writer but the formatting will be all messed up
StirlingPDF converts from PDF to many thing including RTF, Word, and XML.
That’s what I use.
Stirling PDF
https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDFbig up Stirling. it’s super easy to host and packed with features. one of my favourite apps
Might not be exactly what you’re looking for but I find Gotenberg quite handy for related activities.
This is really neat!
