Is there a free (i.e. gratis) way to convert a PDF file to Windows EMF (Enhanced Meta File) in such a way that text which uses fonts embedded in the PDF will be rendered the same way in MS Office PowerPoint? I guess one would have to replace the text with a filled path, but that would be all right since I only want to show the result, not edit it.
I tried pstoedit, but the font embedding seems to be tricky. Looking at the manual on font handling it seems as if -dt
should turn text into filled paths, but in this case the paths are apparently really just polygons, connecting segment end points but not doing any Bézier curves in between. So the result looks strange, e.g. with diamonds as the dots of all the ‘i’.
I've read in several places (e.g. here) that inkscape could be used to convert PDF to EMF. But on Windows the PDF import hangs without showing a dialog. On Linux, I get an import dialog but the only option for text handling is to leave text as text; I can't convert to paths so without the embedded fonts I'm forced to use system fonts instead.
I've also tried ImageMagick convert
, but that seems to rasterize the image so the result looks blurry.
For one application, namely embedding LaTeX formulas into PowerPoint, this post suggests alternatives (at least some of which work via DVI instead of PDF, and MHTML instead of EMF. But there are many more tools which can create PDF but not EMF, so the general problem remains.
I have access to Windows, Linux and OS X, so a suggested answer may use any combination of OS if that helps. If you don't have a complete solution, then a partial solution may still help. E.g. some PDF-to-PDF converter which replaces text with filled paths. Or some tool to extract fonts from PDF and save them in separate files, where other tools (like pstoedit or inkscape) might pick them up and use them to render the texts. Or anything else you consider a significant step towards a solution.