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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