PDF Conversion to an FG Module: Information Index

[Talyn]

You can also load a PDF into GIMP to extract images; yay for open source free software and all that jazz. For that matter, just right clicking an image in Acrobat Reader will give you the option of opening it in Paint (or whatever the one included with Win10 is called).

If it helps, once I do a text export with Acrobat (Pro) I load it into Notepad++ and do an advanced search replace for " \r" to "\r" and " \n" to "\n" to get rid of all those sentences and paragraphs with a trailing space that PDFs seem to like. Then I replace the smart single quotes with a dumb single quote (mainly because they look silly in FG's teensy weensy fonts) but I keep smart double quotes, which if I decide to keep in reference manual pages I will replace with their ASCII equivalents.

After those few find/replaces, that usually gets things ready to work with and easier to copy/paste either directly into FG or into the XML file I'm working in.

[Minty23185Fresh]

You can also load a PDF into GIMP to extract images...
right clicking an image in Acrobat Reader will give you the option...
text ... into Notepad++ … replace for " \r" to "\r" and " \n" to "\n" ...

Again Talyn, thanks for responding...

Gimp... I haven't gotten around to it, not because I'm afraid, it's just, how many graphics editors do I need? Right? Photoshop, Gimp, Krita, Inkscape, blah, blah, blah-blah....

Hadn't tried the Reader... I'll give that a go too...

As I mentioned to Lord Entrails, I wrote a little extension that strips all those little nasties (CRs and LFs) plus does the ASCII substitutions and warns of any ASCII character > 127. It also does ligature fixes for me. All inside the Windows Clipboard. So when I Ctrl-V into my Story window in FG all that yuck is gone.

It needs some cleaning up and then I'll probably post it.

Thanks....

[Minty23185Fresh]

I think I'm about done here. I hope some find this of interest and assistance.

The real meat of this work is in post 2 & 3 above

If readers have anything, anything at all, that they would like to add to the summaries in posts 2 & 3 of this thread please let me know.

[Myrdin Potter]

I convert from pdf to FG and I use the FG program for data entry. I think I go about twice as fast as you, but that is probably from practice.

I use the free adobe reader and GIMP. I usually copy images via adobe and paste into gimp where I size them.

This thread is a helpful resource, thanks.

[Erin Righ]

Thanks for this thread, for the record, Gimp ignores pw protection too, but converts everything to a graphic

[Minty23185Fresh]

I convert from pdf to FG and I use the FG program for data entry...

I do too. I've read elsewhere how you employ Word to do text cleanup prior to pasting to FG. My machinations are similar, instead I use a little extension I wrote that does similar cleanup. I was going to add a table importer to it and then I saw celestian's extension.

… Gimp ignores pw protection too, but converts everything to a graphic.

Noted. I corrected the table in post 3.

And I've added a few more "Useful Tools" to the list.

Myrdin & Erin, thanks for the input.

[mostcallmetim]

I find all of these tips extremely useful. However, I do have one question... What if the PDF is just a compilation of JPGs? Meaning there is no way to identify all of the text so you can just copy and paste directly into FG.

Currently, I copy the image and paste into OneNote and then "Copy Text from Image". Only downfall of this method is that sometimes extra spaces or symbols will be copied in the text and in order to get things right I have to go through and edit everything.

Anything you have learned to make this process faster would be appreciated, I'm converting over 150 monsters from reddit UnearthedArcana basically. And well unless there's an easier way, I think I've become a little over ambitious. lol.

[Zacchaeus]

For 5e NPCs there's NPC Engineer.

Otherwise copy to something like Notepad++ and use search/replace to get rid of extra spaces and unwanted hyphens etc and paste that into FG.

[LordEntrails]

I find all of these tips extremely useful. However, I do have one question... What if the PDF is just a compilation of JPGs? Meaning there is no way to identify all of the text so you can just copy and paste directly into FG.

Currently, I copy the image and paste into OneNote and then "Copy Text from Image". Only downfall of this method is that sometimes extra spaces or symbols will be copied in the text and in order to get things right I have to go through and edit everything.

Anything you have learned to make this process faster would be appreciated, I'm converting over 150 monsters from reddit UnearthedArcana basically. And well unless there's an easier way, I think I've become a little over ambitious. lol.

That's the problem with text recognition, it has flaws.

If you want lots of monsters, see Maasq's conversion of the Monster a Day / 1d6 Adventures. It has over 400 NPCs in it; https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...ter-Compendium

[Minty23185Fresh]

... there is no way to identify all of the text so you can just copy and paste...

One of the threads in post two (text from images) talks a bit about this. But if I understand correctly OneNote might be doing this for you? Sometimes software included with printers can deal with OCR too.

... sometimes extra spaces or symbols will be copied in the text and in order to get things right I have to go through and edit everything ...

This isn't specific to your particular project. In every module I have been converting there seems to be some issue with "extra characters".

I use some lua code to help me clean out extra line feeds, carriage returns, and unprintable characters.