[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Sunday June 3, 2018

[Akkana Peck]

Bobbie Sellers writes:
>     So Michael has a problem in that he needs to copy text from a
> .pdf file.  Looks like he will have to make a copy of the file then
> load it into a .pdf editor and attempt to copy the pages he needs
> to a text editor.

Did he try pdftotext? On Debian it's in the poppler-utils package.
Some PDFs are impossible (they're just an image of text), others
are very difficult (anything with a 2-column layout probably
won't work, and even with some simple layouts you'll see spaces
missing or other problems) but some PDFs convert just fine.
And on the documents where pdftotext doesn't work, a PDF editor
probably wouldn't do much better.

(Rant omitted about what a terrible format PDF is for anything
except hardcopy printing.)

        ...Akkana