Doxillion Document Converter

A free version of NCH Software's Doxillion Document Converter can be downloaded here:

http://www.nchsoftware.com/documentconvert/index.html?gclid=COK4nq3xldECFVuBswodsuQMrA

The software can convert Word documents, PDFs, Excel files, and files of many other formats to the .docx, .txt., .rtf, .html, .odt, .pdf, and .xml formats.

As you can see in this example, it will successfully convert .pdf files to text files. The litigation support or paralegal will find it helpful to note that this utility will successfully transfer the headers of PDFs to text files. I have had problems with Adobe Acrobat omitting the headers of the PDF of PACER federal court filings from the text files it generates with Acrobat actions. Testing the same sample files with Doxillion showed that Acrobat's errors were not repeated with NCH's program. This is very helpful if you want to pull the dates from the headers to rename the files, or pull the case numbers to help file them.

Incidentally I had tried exporting the files from Acrobat first as .rtf files (which does preserve the case information in the headers) and them converting them to .txt files with the free utillity found here, posted on the blog of Emre Akkas, which while it did give me text files with case information in the headings, it did so in a format on which findstr did not run successfully. This was not a problem with the Doxillion converted files.

WinMerge

If you need to compare data sets in two different folders, or you want to compare the contents of two different files consider the free utility, WinMerge. It can be downloaded from http://winmerge.org/ .

As you can see it will confirm if the contents of two files are identical . . .

. . . highlight the differences between two files [drag files into WinMerge from Windows Explorer]:

.. . and also allow you to find the differences in files between two folders, and allow you to merge them.

VeraCrypt

There's another great utility available from the French company, IDRIX, called VeraCrypt. See: https://www.idrix.fr/Root/content/category/7/32/60/ . This is based on TrueCrypt, and can open TrueCrypt volumes. IDRIX claims that its utility has enhanced security features, which they concede come with the trade-off of encrypted files taking longer to open.

A helpful tutorial on how to use the utility is available here. VeraCrypt comes with a cool James Bond style feature allowing you to create a hidden volume inside the encrypted data. So even if someone forces you to reveal the password for the encrypted drive, partition, or file, your truly sensitive data can remain out of the hands of your foes. The 'free' space on any volume encrypted with VeraCrypt is always actually filled with random data, so there's no way to tell that there's extra space taken up with useful data. The hidden data is simply accessed with a password that is different from your decoy data.

VeraCrypt has you select both an encryption algorithm and a hash algorithm. The encryption algorithm encoded the data so it can only be accessed with a password. The hash algorithm allows the recipient to confirm that they have received the same exact data you intended to send.

An odd feature of VeraCrypt is that the wizard makes you generate the encryption keys by randomly moving your mouse cursor around on the screen . . .

A VeraCrypt file will appear as an extensionless file with the file size of the data you specified that it could be capable of holding - not just what you added.

The recipient clicks 'Select File' to browse to the encrypted file, and then clicks MOUNT to enter the password.