Convert PDF to Word, the easy way !

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AdobePDF

Adobe's PDF(Portable Document Format) format is the de-facto standard for sharing information in today's age of web technologies. Since its introduction in the 90's, the popularity of the PDF has increased tremendously as a standard for 2D data exchange. Today, a lot of information on the web is available only in the PDF format and occasionally, there arises a need to edit the document or to extract specific information from it. Though the format was released as an open standard in 2008, Adobe still has the 'Adobe Writer' as proprietary and requires you to purchase a license to use it, which means essentially that you need to pay if you intend to create or edit a PDF document. In this context, it becomes really handy to have a tool which can convert the PDF into something more editable and open to use, such as the Word format. Recently, I have stumbled upon an online tool which does this job neatly and perfectly. Let me introduce you to "Convert PDF to Word".

The striking aspect of the site is its simplicity. Basically the site is just a single page which contains links to some sister sites which are equally useful, the conversion tool in the middle portion and a strip of ads powered by Google (and believe me, they don't get in the way of your work !). The whole working of the tool is also simple; just select the PDF document which needs to be converted and hit "Convert and Download" !

 

convertPtoX

 

The layout of the original document and the images in it were preserved, and the quality of the output was also decent. Overall, the tool does what it claims to do and in the simplest way possible. While you are at it, it's also good to check out the sister sites, each of which claims to do some more conversions, say from PDF to text, PDF to html and even text to PDF. That's right, now you know where to head to, in case you want to create a quick and dirty PDF document !

Drawings of da Vinci

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Ginevra de' Benci Are you an avid art lover ? Does art make a part of your daily dosage of web ? Then "Drawings of Leonardo da-Vinci" is the site for you. The site is dedicated to various drawings and studies of Leonardo, which are certain to amuse you with the level of detail they contain.

The design of the site itself is plain, stating its simple goal and contains around 54 drawings by the great art master. While the collection and quality of the images are impressive, it does miss some Leonardo master pieces including the famous "The Adoration of the Magi". I could not comprehend the reason behind not including these masterpieces as well. There is also a downloadable version of the images for both Windows and UNIX (basically, this means the images are zipped and provided in two formats, zip and tar) each of which weighs around 10 MB.

A German version of the site also exists and can be reached at http://www.sabon.org/leonardo/index.html. For those few, who are interested to learn more about Leonardo, the site offers numerous links to content on the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci. While there's nothing much technological to credit the site with, the simple idea and inspiration behind its existence deserves mention.