Extract PDF images, text, fonts and files with Weeny Free PDF Extractor
It’s easy to view the contents of a PDF, but extracting them for reuse elsewhere takes more effort. Even if you install something PDF to JPEG Expert to grab the images from a document, for instance, that won’t help you save the text, fonts, or other resources a PDF might contain.
Weeny Free PDF Extractor claims to offer a simpler solution. It doesn’t just grab the pictures, or the text. Instead the program cycles through 1, 10, 100 or as many PDFs as you like, extracting all their resources -- images, text, fonts and files -- and saving them to disk.
Installation was quick, easy and adware-free, and the program appeared very straightforward. Click "Add PDFs" to select and import your target PDFs, choose an output folder, click "Extract Now", and wait for the results.
It didn’t take long to spot some limitations, however. You can’t drag and drop PDFs onto the program. The source list can’t be selected and tweaked using the usual Windows shortcuts (pressing Ctrl+A to "select all", say). You can’t even double-click a PDF file in the list to preview it, even though that’s obviously useful and extremely easy to support.
There’s no progress bar while Weeny Free PDF Extractor is working, either, no indication of which file it’s processing right now. Click inside the program window while it’s extracting, in fact, and you’ll be told "Weeny Free PDF Extractor is not responding". This isn’t a major issue -- it’s just busy, and if you wait the program will become usable again, in time -- but it’s still a little clumsy.
The results of all this were generally good. The program correctly extracted any embedded fonts and Jpeg images, as well as producing a .TXT file with the text content of each of our PDFs. Possible Unicode issues meant one file had text which l o o k e d l i k e t h i s , but for the most part it worked very well.
There were also some oddities -- the program saved several zero-byte TIFFs and BMPs -- but we’re not sure whether they were due to issues with the conversion process or our source documents.
And so, on balance, we’d say Weeny Free PDF Extractor does more than enough to be useful. If you need an easier way to batch extract PDF content then it’s worth a closer look.