PDF Converter

[Bidmaron]

Oh, cool Dulux. I will definitely check that out then if it does Visual Basic.
I don't believe any of the pdfs I have are images. I have some software to ocr images if I have to (but I haven't used it in years so probably would need updating)

[Myrdin Potter]

Most the mainstream PDF software has a built in OCR. Even scanned text can get recognized as text and cut and pasted.

Most of my experience in pulling PDF's into Word and such results in a jumbled mess and I think many commercial PDF are converted from desktop publishing programs and things like tables just do not convert well.

I can cut and paste sections into word and then manipulate it better than grabbing a whole document, unless the document is just normal paragraphs without fancy layouts.

[Talyn]

I'm super-lazy so I just fire my PDFs through https://www.extractpdf.com/ (unless they exceed the 14MB limit) and it spits out a .txt file so I can copy/paste into Notepad++ then do the markup from there. It also gives a .zip with every image in the PDF and a .zip with the fonts.

The .txt needs a little cleaning up but that's also the case if I do a text export directly from Acrobat itself. It's not too bad and once it's cleaned up, it's ready to go if you're doing Notepad++ like I do or if you want to insert the custom markup for either PAR5E or Ikael's content importer extension.

[ddavison]

A lot depends on whether or not the PDF is locked or not as well.

[Bidmaron]

What happens if it is locked? I presumed most were these days?

[Talyn]

If the PDF is locked you can't edit or export text/images.

[Bidmaron]

So in that case you would have to print it to an image file, scan and our it I guess.

[Talyn]

Or just unlock it. Which is a trivial matter but possibly a grey area if that particular discussion violates the ToS on the forum so, we'll just leave it at that.

[damned]

OneNote does excellent OCR.

[Bidmaron]

I had no idea it did, but I don't think it has a scripting language I want to learn.