[pdftex] How to covert pdf file into latex file?

[Robin Fairbairns]

> On Wednesday 12 July 2006 20:57, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> > >>>>> "John" == John R Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com> writes:
> >   >
> >   > You cannot back up from a pdf file into InDesign or Quark
> >   > either.
> >
> > Are you sure?  If a program uses all the features defined in the PDF
> > standard when producing a pdf file, I'm pretty sure that you can
> > extract a lot of logical markup from the pdf file.
> 
> Well this would be a task on the order of converting a rtf file
> to xml or vice versa.  And I know of no one who has even attempted this kind 
> of
> reverse engineering on a pdf file.

me neither.  (i wrote my faq answer in good faith.)

there _is_ (supposedly) a way of getting badly-marked-up latex from a
pdf file, which i explain in the answer, though i've not managed it
myself.

incidentally, i've found the alleged path from pdf to rtf for input
into word is pretty hopeless too: the tool seems not to notice tex's
"calculated" spaces (it presumably wants explicit "space" characters).
as a result the generated text is pretty unreadable.  (if this route
worked, it could be also used to produce latex.)

robin