PDF to Text Conversion

[mehrnosh]

Hi
I know this sound tough but is there any way by which we can convert a PDF file to Text file. or is there a source code available showing the format of PDF file

Thanks

 

[iSeriesCodePoet]

It really depends on the PDF file. If it is an image... you won't be able to. If it is text, then Adobe has a plug-in for the reader to see just the text (actually for an assesability plug-in). Or open it up in a text editor. iSeriesCodePoet
IBM iSeries (AS/400) Programmer

 

[BinzerOrg]

Xpdf, freeware offered under the GNU General Public License version 2, contains a component called "pdftotext" that writes any text in a Portable Document Format file to a plain text file. Physical (relative position) formatting can be preserved using the '-layout' configuration option.

ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdf-2.02-win32.zip

 

[IRstuff]

If you simply looking for the text content, Acrobat Edit|Copy File to Clipboard, will copy all the text in the PDF file to the Clipboard and you can paste it into another document.

Another option is to export as EPS or Postscript, but that gets you a lot of Postscript commands as well.

 

[tkermode]

A similar solution to the one offered by BinzerOrg is to use GSView, found at

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/.

This is another open source application. It does require that you install Ghostscript, which is also open source. Both apps run on Windows and are relatively straightforward. GSView actually uses Ghostscript behind the scenes--it's a user-friendly front end for Ghostscript, and as such it allows you to create PDFs, extract text, and generally convert from/into a variety of formats (PDF, PS, TIFF, text, etc.)