Is it possible to grab text from a pdf file?
By that I mean copy an area of text from an Adobe Reader document and then paste it into Word.
Part of my thinks that a key point of PDFs is that you CAN'T do that but sometimes there are ways round these things.
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2
889
When you create a PDF document you've got the option to permit or forbid copying, so some PDF text you can copy and some you can't.
3
zoltan
Initially, I thought no it wasn't.
About 18 months ago, I was corrected by LAN.
I was alerted to a freeware product on the market called "Foxit reader".
This allows you to copy segments of PDF's and, also add data into an existing PDF.
It's a great program - do a google search for it.
Cheers
Zoltan
4
klaush
I believe that ghostscript can re-process your PDFs and allows to remove any of those options. The options of "unreadable" or "unprintable" PDF are bullshit anyway - you can always do a series of creenshot or someting the like.
5
lan
as zoltan suggests, it's doable with foxit if the pdf is based on text - i've come across a number where they've basically embedded TIFF files inside a PDF. obviously, since there's no text in there, you can't copy'n'paste it.
easy way to check that - zoom in repeatedly. if it pixellates, it's an embedded graphic.
6
count_zero
<blockquote>Quote
<hr>you can always do a series of screenshot or someting the like<hr></blockquote>Yes. Previously when I've been researching something I copy and paste text from different articles into Word and if it's from a PDF then I press the 'Print Screen' button and then paste the graphic file into the word document.
That works but it's just not as convenient as text, especially when I come to the stage where I want to go through a lot of information just highlighting the really useful parts.
I'll check out foxit and see if it is quick and easy enough to be worth it.
8
boatcrew
Some of these tools might help. If the PDF file is online you can use Google to convert it to HTML. For example, if the pdf document is found online at http://example.com/my-document.pdf, then just type this into Google:
site:http://example.com/my-document.pdf<BR><BR>Google should then offer you a link to "view as HTML".
You can then just copy/paste the text from Google's cache. To remove formatting, copy/paste from Google's cache to a text editor (like Notepad) and then copy/paste from the text editor to the final destination.
On Linux there is a program called pdf2html. If you are using Linux or Mac and have the Lynx browser installed there are nice ways to extract the text out of the HTML.... (e.g., lynx -dump my-file.html >text-output.txt)
Pro tip
Lonely Planet
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