Solid PDF to Word for Mac vs. Apple Automator App

Does Apple OS X provide a method for converting PDF files into other formats? Sort of. You can write an automator application to convert PDF files into RTF documents but you can only extract the text. No formatting is preserved, no tables and no images. If you just need text then the automator application can deliver text. Some of the time.

In our experience the automator application can only handle very simple PDF files. It closes with unexpected errors when offered PDF files with non-standard encoding (very common issue with PDF files), it creates 0 byte files for other PDFs that it cannot convert and generally didnʼt perform robustly to provide useful results.


The following pages show the original PDF and the conversion with Solid PDF to Word for Mac and Appleʼs extract text functionality.

This test file has great formatting elements to demonstrate why you want to use Solid PDF to Word for Mac. Graphics, columns, lines, bullet lists and footers are included.



You can easily see the difference in the conversion!



Tables are created as tables in Word ... not as a text!