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https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3650957/how-to-extract-text-from-a-pdf
Main answers are 7 years old, likely irrelevant, but the links on the right lead to more interesting answers.
My resume was written in OpenOffice, iirc: http://tedroche.com/homepage/~tedroche/TedRocheResume.html
I ran this through (Linux) pdftotext:
http://tedroche.com/homepage/~tedroche/TedRocheResume.txt
Not bad!
Columnar data out of Excel or similar into DBFs is a lot harder. I'll be interested to hear what others might suggest.
On Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 4:38 PM, Ted Roche tedroche@gmail.com wrote:
In my limited experience, PDF is trouble. PDF is essential a printer output file, in PostScript, encapsulated as document. There's lots of info about fonts, geometry and there are letters placed in specific places, not necessarily in the order you think, depending on the application that generated the print image, and the printer drivers used. It doesn't help that there are lots of different PDF standards ("I love standards, that's why I have so many!") and extensions to do things like provide accessiblility or to slim it down for web and visual presentation (vs. High-resolution for print pre-press).
Recently, I was trying to copy one of my articles out of a PDF, and I found that the two snaked columns that appeared to you and me meant nothing to the PDF. Highlighting the text got line one of column one, then line one of column two, all the way down. Pretty frustrating.
There are some smart applications out there. Monarch was advertised years ago
Here's an SO question, with some possiblities:
On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 11:19 AM, Paul H. Tarver paul@tpcqpc.com wrote:
Original Thread: Getting count of rows in a text file -- best approach?
A couple of times I've heard people mention reading in PDF files using FileToStr and I want to know more about reading and extracting data from PDF files. I do a lot of data conversion and interface work with lots of file formats, but I've not been very successful at importing and extracting data from PDF reports. Obviously a scanned image saved as a PDF would have to be ocr'd first, but is there is a reliable way to extract data from PDF reports and if so, how? I'm sure I don't know all the ends and outs of the PDF format, but when I try, I seem to get a strange mix of formatting details and data combined in a random way.
Am I being thick here or is there really a way that I can get any PDF file from any client and then successfully extract the data elements from that format?
I'm prepared to be thought of as stupid but be gentle! :)
Paul H. Tarver Tarver Program Consultants, Inc. Email: paul@tpcqpc.com
-----Original Message----- From: Brant E. Layton [mailto:dcci@futureone.com] Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2017 3:17 PM To: profoxtech@leafe.com Subject: RE: Getting count of rows in a text file -- best approach?
|My experience was moving PDF files in and out of SQLServer tables - |found an abrupt truncation at the 16,777,184 mark...
Brant Layton| |480.964.1316| On 4/26/2017 12:57 PM, profoxtech-request@leafe.com wrote:
RE: Getting count of rows in a text file -- best approach?
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