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

[Bobbie Sellers]

On 06/04/2018 04:40 PM, Akkana Peck wrote:

     Thanks for your suggestion Akkana Peck,
     In order that it is not missed I have forwarded a copy with the 
addition to the
subject line of PDF conversion so that he does not overlook it.
> 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

     It can be quite annoying when the information you need is hidden
deep inside a file with hundreds of pages or even fewer which
cannot generally be easily copied except to paper or maybe with
the editor to another .pdf.

     Bobbie