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Trapeze 1.3.1

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(4) 2.5

Convert PDF to RTF, ASCII or text files. Shareware ($29.95)

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MD Software, LLC

Trapeze is a drag-and-drop text extraction utility that converts PDF files to editable HTML, RTF, ASCII or plain text.

Trapeze puts you in control over the conversion process, with options for white space stripping, paragraph rewrapping and page break marking. Additional features include advanced text encoding, targeted RTF optimization (TextEdit or Microsoft Word), and support for encrypted (password protected) PDF.

Trapeze's powerful reformatting engine is capable of standard HTML conversion, high quality RTF rendering and faithful plain text reproduction; a must for users

What's New

Jumbled pages fix. Fixed problem that could lead to jumbled pages in converted document.

Requirements
PPC, Mac OS X 10.3 or later.

TextLightning

+1
Demo $27

Convert PDF files to RTF text ...

Trapeze User Discussion (Write a Review)

ver. 1.x:

(4)

Your rating: Now say why...

Overall:

(4)

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globetrotterdk reviewed on 09 Mar 2007

Trapeze unfortunately appears to be the best software on offer for Mac users wishing to convert .pdf files to .doc or .rtf format.

It really is a shame as the developer is very responsive to users needs and problems (also developer of Amnesty). Only about 1/3 of the .pdf files originally formatted in .doc or .rtf are reconverted in passable shape. Most either end up with mangled formatting or with unreadable text (maybe in Symbol font).

There are Windows programs that are able to convert from .pdf to .doc or .rtf around 98% - 100% of the time with perfect format recreation. Be careful if you go that route as there is a fair amount of vaporware in this category.

[Version 1.3.1]

Anonymous reviewed on 28 Mar 2005

I used the trial version (converts up to 3 pages only) to convert a pdf to rich text. I used Simple Text to make a few quick changes, saved as pdf again and had no problems at all. Worked flawlessly.

[Version 1.2.3]

1 Reply

Anonymous commented on 28 Mar 2005

Oops - I meant Text Edit, not Simple Text. Guess I'm showing my age - ha.

Anonymous reviewed on 15 Mar 2005

In a random test of a PDF, when the converted RTF file was opened in Word, a substantial amount of the text appeared in the Symbol font which made it look like Greek. Not worth spending money on an application that cannot get its fonts right.

[Version 1.2.3]

1 Reply

Anonymous commented on 15 Mar 2005

You should submit your random PDF to them.

Anonymous reviewed on 14 Dec 2004

It seems to do the job nicely on english PDF files. However, it will produce an error ("The file 'your file name.rtf' because a file system error occurred while trying to write the converted document.") if a converted file of the same name already exists. So, you must either trash the converted file of the same name or rename it before attempting to convert its PDF again. It would be more convenient if Trapeze simply overwrote the file or prompted the user for a new file name.

The error message also causes Trapeze to become stuck in the background if another app is brought to the front. One must click on Trapeze in the dock to bring it to the front in such a case as clicking on it with the mouse won't work. Then to dismiss the error message you must hit return on the keyboard.

All in all, it does a nice job of extracting text, but minor bugs could be frustrating over time. It's no doubt a small price to pay for those who must do this sort of text extraction on a regular basis, and for casual use it's small text tag at the bottom of the converted document is unobtrusive.

[Version 1.2.2]

1 Reply

Anonymous commented on 23 Feb 2005

Thanks for the input concerning the problems with existing files with the same file name. We'll make sure to address this in our next major point release (1.3).

Anonymous reviewed on 21 Sep 2004

Easy to use, but iIt only produces continues text without spacing between words. Not good.

[Version 1.1.1]

1 Reply

Anonymous commented on 07 Oct 2004

Try the "Use relaxed layout spacing" option. Works for me.

Anonymous reviewed on 02 Aug 2004

This app seems to work as advertised when used on documents comprising english text. However, if you have special characters like german umlaute or french accents etc., the app gets into deep trouble, ie. the results are unusable.
This should be mentioned somewhere, I guess.
Maybe it is due to the program that generated the PDF to be converted? I only tried PDF to RTF or HTML or plain text; my own PDF's are generated by OS X own PDF-engine steered by some TeX-application like teTeX, TeXShop. Though this produces PDF's which are perfectly readable by Preview or Acrobat, er, Adobe Reader, etc.

[Version 1.1]

1 Reply

Anonymous commented on 17 Sep 2004

Strange, I have no problems having Trapeze properly recognise special accented characters such as á, é, í, ú and ó, but special Icelandic ones like: ý, þ, ð seem to get a little corrupt, but are readable and easily fixed with search&replace functions.

Maybe this has something to do with the origin of the pdf-document.

Anonymous reviewed on 11 Jun 2004

PDFs created by scanned images do not contain any extractable text information. As a result, Trapeze cannot "extract" and "convert" anything from your scanned pages. FYI, this is answered in the FAQ section of Trapeze Help. It sounds like you are interested in obtaining an OCR tool, which is an imperfect solution, but may help you nonetheless.

[Version 1.0.3]

Anonymous reviewed on 10 Jun 2004

I tried this out with regular black and white text PDF's, grayscale text and image PDF's, and text on multicolor background PDF's, all created by a Microtek 4850 scanner and readily accessible in Preview or Appleworks. Trapeze in all cases failed to open the files, reporting that they weren't PDF's.

[Version 1.0.3]

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