Documents v. HTML

Can anyone weigh in on the relative merits of PDF or Word documents vs. on-page HTML in terms of crawling and indexing? I'm working on a site with a large quantity of articles and am unsure whether converting them all to html is worth the effort. Alternatively, can anyone share experiences or possibilities for batch interconversion of pdf, word, and printer-friendly html documents?

Thanks.

Any site that I work on that has PDFs or word documents to download always get converted to pages on the site. I then offer the visitor an opportunity to download. I don't worry about duplicate text just because it's never been a problem for me. I say it is worth the effort.

I do not know if a batch converter like you need.

matt cutts says: "We absolutely do process PDF files" "users don't always like being sent to a PDF. If you can make your content in a Web-Native format, such as pure HTML, that's often a little more useful to users than just a pure PDF file" "There are, however, some situations in which we can actually run OCR on a PDF"

You might want to give ImageMagick a go, it is a command line utility that you can use to convert images. With the ghostdoc libraries you can convert pdf's to images. And its free.