Everyone knows that in order for information to be of any use to the general public, it must be capable of being rendered by any possible platform and operating system out there.
As a consequence, universal formats such as HTML and PDF have become general household names in the world of data exchange whether it be on the World Wide Web or in the professional work environment.
No doubt, you've experienced the need to convert between the two formats in such cases where some users don't have a PDF reader or if you need to keep the integrity of the HTML web page for others to view. Notably, with the growing widespread use of the World Wide Web, website construction using HTML is booming into a growing industry. Everyone from the professional designer to the most amateur are creating HTML pages.
*Web Designing, HTML and You
A good website is a good balance between textual and visual data. The first impression on the 3 second attention span of a Web surfer is important. Hence, most likely, you'll spend most of your time on the content of your site.
In order to achieve a visually appealing site you'll probably try to cram all kinds of professional graphics and images on your page, which translates into hours of fine-tuning with image file formats such as JPEGs, GIFs, and SWF (flash files). Too much time and too much work.
Also to remember is that the content of a website depends upon its purpose. Hence, the amount and nature of your data can vary. For some, using external links and supplementary formats is the most common way to populate a website. However, it means you'll also have to consider the amount of linkage and levels you want your site to contain--that means more planning and organizing.
Let's not forget, that web pages work with an underlying programming language, most commonly HTML. You'll need to use HTML for embedding the content onto your web page. That can take hours of tedious encoding and configuration. Does the amount of work ever cease?
*HTML and the PDF
A simple way to be efficient?—Incorporate content already converted directly into HTML. This is where one data exchange format can come in handy: the PDF.
Conversion using material from a PDF will allow for easier web content construction. In addition, PDFs retain the graphic integrity of the image, being capable of rendering vector and bitmap images. So you don't have to worry about losing image quality.
By being able to recreate the PDF in HTML, the PDF will be able to be shown right on the website without having to click on an attachment, saving you the time of organizing and re-arranging your site. It may sound unorthodox, but if you have an information container that can contain and retain the integrity of both the textual and graphical information you need, why not use it for that purpose? Certain processes for constructing a website can't be totally done away with altogether, like the HTML coding aspect. It can only be facilitated.
*Isn't PDF to HTML Conversion Limited?
Converting the PDF format into HTML is nothing new. There are many conversion software applications out there that provide the functionality--ours included.
Both the Standard and Professional versions of our Able2Extract v.3.0 software has the HTML conversion capabilities for scanned and native PDFs. It allows to you convert your PDFs into HTML and your HTML into PDFs and other formats.
As great as it is, the 3.0 version only lacks the ability to convert the images from the same PDF file. So while you could convert your HTML only the textual information would be converted.
*Limited? Not Any Longer. . .
However, we've exceeded our own Able2Extract technology and our improved Able2Extract v.4.0 Professional now has better PDF to HTML output. This latest version has the ability to take a PDF and convert both the graphics and the text into HTML (CSS).
For instance, you can convert a PDF file made from PowerPoint into HTML and still have the original colours and designs. So for whatever type of information you find, you can incorporate that onto your website while having control over the conversion process.
If you've converted documents using our software before, you'll know how to perform conversions in the latest version. All you have to do is open the file in your application, select the text—and images, you wish to convert and just click on the Convert to HTML icon. The result—pure HTML content with both images and text!
Reena works for Investintech.com Inc., the developer and publisher of powerful PDF creation and extraction software products, including Able2Extract and the Sonic PDF Creator.
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