When I was developing my PDF reader Podofyllin, one of my goals was for it to be able to export from PDF to Rich Text Format. I never managed to get that to work, but in the light of your comments about supporting PDF as one of the convertible formats in Textovert, I revisited Podofyllin yesterday with the aim of adding that feature. And to my amazement it seems to work.

Before implementing any PDF conversions in Textovert, I’d be very grateful if you could test and comment on a beta of Podofyllin, which does now export PDF to RTF. If that code does a good enough job, then in the coming couple of weeks I will add PDF as one of the supported formats in Textovert, although that won’t rely so much on textutil as on my own code, and Quartz 2D support in macOS.

Podofyllin version 1.5 beta, build 38, adds a new command to its File menu to Export Rich Text. It also has printing disabled, as that has stopped working in recent versions of macOS, and needs repairs. I have disabled its update checking mechanism, so you won’t be pestered to ‘upgrade’ to version 1.4 when using this beta. Otherwise it retains all the features of version 1.4, and still has that Help book.

From my initial testing here the only significant oddity with the RTFs it writes may be small font sizes. There may be the occasional inappropriate use of a font, such as a line set in Courier in the midst of a paragraph in Helvetica, but those should be straightforward to correct. For small font sizes, I have simply selected all and used the Bigger font command to enlarge them all.

Podofyllin 1.5 beta, build 38, is now available from here: podofyllin15b
but not from anywhere else, for the time being. It requires macOS 11.5 or later.

Making the big presumption that PDF to RTF conversion proves worthwhile, this would make it possible to include PDF as one of the supported formats in Textovert. The snag is that would require the whole of any PDF document to be read into memory, before it could be converted to another format, in contrast to other formats where I suspect that textutil streams the input file during conversion. I don’t think there is any way to do that with PDF, because of its complex data structure.

So, if you think that this beta’s conversion of PDF to plain text and RTF is good enough to be useful, please let me know whether you want it built into Textovert, together with PDF to the other supported formats, or left in Podofyllin.

I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving, and thank you for your friendship, contributions and engagement.