Can I have duplicate content without penalty?

[evotsi]

I am currently working on a company that acts as a distributor for 5 or so manufacturers. Each of the manufacturers has pdf's of various technical specs for their products hosted on their respective sites. However their websites are fairly hard to browse. Only about one quarter of the pdf's show up in Google search results. I am planning on converting all of the pdf's to text and including them on the company website as a service to it's customers. How might this affect the site in Google's eyes? Help it, hurt it, or...

[Quadrille]

There's never a penalty for duplicate content, merely a risk that the affected pages may not get indexed very favourably.

I see no reason why it should do you harm.

And it will certainly help your visitors.

Do ensure the new pages have unique titles and meta tags, and consider linking to the pdfs only from your html version.

NB - you may need to check the copyright situation!