Convert file from .pdf to .odt

[odo5435]

I can find many applications that will convert from .odt to .pdf but I can't seem to find any that'll do the reverse. I've recently had a spate of forms to complete that only come in .pdf and my handwriting is atrocious. Many years ago I had a program (can't remember its name and prob pirate anyway) that would convert the file to .doc and it was easily finished.

Is there a Linux application that will do this?

[Fornhamfred]

This seems to be what you are looking for http://askubuntu.com/questions/166875/c ... s-in-a-pdf

I have tested it out and it works by annotating an existing pdf and then resaving as a pdf.

[viking777]

Libreoffice is supposed to be able to edit pdf files. I can't tell you for sure because I don't use it, but it must be worth a look. In fact I use Abiword and even it can edit them and save them as .odt so you could try that instead if you don't want the Libreoffice bloatware.

[odo5435]

Thanks to you both for your replies and I'm sorry it's taken so long for me to get back to this.

I looked at Xournal as was suggested in your link @Fornhamfed but it was basically just overlaying a text layer on the document and re-saving it as .pdf. When you open a .pdf file with LibreOffice (when you have pdfimport installed) it opens in LibreDraw which allows you to do the same thing so that was not what I was looking for.

I did try AbiWord @viking but that messed up the formatting of the document when I opened it and was not usable for me in this case.

I ended up resorting to overlaying text boxes in LibreDraw which gave me results but took some fiddling with alignment and such. I did discover that the document had a couple of text boxes built in. They were not obvious. I only found them by accidentally clicking on the area but LibreDraw did allow me to enter text into those boxes also. If the .pdf file is pre-formatted with interactive text boxes (and you can find them), then I'd imagine LibreDraw works fine.

I didn't find what I was looking for but I did achieve a result and that was something. Thanks for your input.