pdf edit again.

[Gary Kline]

On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 02:39:14AM +0100, cpghost wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Nov 2007 16:38:55 -0800
> Gary Kline <kline at tao.thought.org> wrote:
> 
> > 	A couple weeks ago I skimmed thru the postings on editing PDF
> > 	files.  Wasn't entirely clear what the answer it because I
> > never thought I would need to edit a GUI file.  I just found a book 
> > 	from 1883 in pdf format.  I would like a text/ASCII/ISO_8859-1
> > 	version.  Tried pfdtotext, but it doesn't work.   Nutshell: is
> > 	there something I can use  to edit/look-at this book and get
> > rid of whateveriit is that's causing pdftotext to fail.  (sorry for
> > 	the grammar.... )
> 
> Old books in PDF are normally scanned bitmaps. There are no characters
> or whatever therein; just pixels (EPS files). If you want to convert
> that to ASCII, you'd need to extract the EPS files (use something like
> pdfimages from the xpdf port), turn them into some bitmap format, and
> run some kind of OCR software on that. It's a slow, unreliable,
> error-prone and painful process though.
> 
> Good luck!


	"Arrrgh" (Charlie Brown).  If it's that tortured, I'll forget
	it; thanks for the clue.  Pretty sure this *was* just phot'd and
	scanned in.

	(Much be how amazon.com has thir zillions of boooks online.
	OCR'ing is serious work; I know that first hand.)

	gary
> 
> -cpghost.
> 
> -- 
> Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"

-- 
  Gary Kline  kline at thought.org   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
      http://jottings.thought.org   http://transfinite.thought.org