PDF data

[BoredBloke]

Does anybody know of any software (free!!!!) which would allow me to get to the data held in a PDF file?

 

[MrRobin]

How do you mean? The data in a table in a PDF? Can you not just highlight, copy and paste into something like excel? Am I missing something?

 

[BoredBloke]

The report I might be getting will be really big and not really an option for cutting and pasting - I want something which will take a PDF and pump the data to a text file so that I can pull it into a database. Excel can't do more than 65000 rows and this will be a lot bigger.

 

[Spacecadet]

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=convert+pdf+to+text&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
This looks quite good and not a bad price:
http://www.docsmartz.net/

once its in a text format you might be able to use Microsofts log parser:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...6B-ABF8-4C25-91B2-F8D975CF8C07&displaylang=en

and a combination of other custom scripts to strip out what you actually want

 

[BoredBloke]

Thanks folks. I've found one that will do it.

 

[Spacecadet]

which one was that?

 

[BoredBloke]

I'll let you know when I've tested it - it might not work yet!!

 

[bored]

pdftotext is distributed with most *nixes and you can get it on Windows as part of cygwin, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdftotext

Edit - if you follow the link in the wikipedia article, there appears to be a download compiled with MSVC which does not require cygwin.

 

[Spacecadet]

pdftotext is distributed with most *nixes and you can get it on Windows as part of cygwin, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdftotext

Edit - if you follow the link in the wikipedia article, there appears to be a download compiled with MSVC which does not require cygwin.

Just tried that... works ok(ish) tables don't seem to come out of it too well though and it would be difficult to programmatically work with the resulting text file.

 

[BoredBloke]

That is what I have been finding with all the free ones. They do things like drop the minus symbol also, which is a pain when it appears in some of the server names we have here (but not all). Also, they are not consistant when handling tables. Sometimes they place data from 3 columns in 3 seperate rows and other times they just join it all together.