any way to turn a pdf file into something OCR-able?
Gary Kline
kline at thought.org
Tue Dec 2 16:00:07 PST 2008
On Tue, Dec 02, 2008 at 02:07:30AM +0100, Roland Smith wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 01, 2008 at 03:14:43PM -0800, Gary Kline wrote:
> > pdftotext fail on the large [32MB] file I've got. Is there any
> > other way I can translate this huge textfile to ascii or html or
> > text?
>
> Please define "fail" in this context? I've used pdftotxt on documents
> exceeding 40MB. However there are of course things that don't work;
>
> 1) Some PDFs are just wrappers around JPEG images. In this case there is
> no text for pdftotext to convert => epic fail.
>
> 2) If the text contains ligatures etc. you should use the proper
> encoding that contains such characters (e.g. '-enc UTF-8') or you will
> loose them.
>
> 3) Things like equations will not render well, if at all. This also
> depends on the encoding.
It probably was a pdf wrapped around a jpeg. I was able to to
another pdf to plaintext in a flash. (*sigh*) it wasn't a total
waste of time because I found the entire text transfered to buugy
ASCII somewhere [[ thanks to some prof ]]. So, if I ever want to run aspell
against a 900-page file, at least I have that option!
gary
>
> Roland
> --
> R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
> [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated]
> pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
--
Gary Kline kline at thought.org http://www.thought.org Public Service Unix
http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org
Flash: The alpha release of Jottings is available: http://jottings.thought.org/index.php
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