can i split a pdf file?

[Gary Kline]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 01:36:48PM -0800, Charlie Kester wrote:
> On Mon 26 Jan 2009 at 00:16:23 PST Polytropon wrote:
> >On Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:06:18 -0800, Gary Kline <kline at thought.org> wrote:
> >>	Thanks, Gents,
> >>
> >>	But according to one smallish pdf file that I send to a web based
> >>	tool, it was not a real pdf.  Or, more accurately, it (the pdf to 
> >>	speech program) couldn't decode it.
> >
> >This is a typical problem with "poorly engineered" PDFs where the
> >author puts in the text as images (you'll see this stupidity across
> >the Web, too).
> 
> In most cases where I've seen this, it's because they had scanned an
> actual printed document.  Many old, out-of-print books are being made
> newly available this way, so I'm not inclined to complain.
> 
> Unfortunately, OCR software still isn't reliable enough (or, if
> reliable, cheap enough) to convert these scanned images to actual text.


	You're probably right about the cost/performance idea.  Still,
	before I get back to the Last few pages of my thesis, maybe I'll
	try feeding parts of my most vanilla image-PDF file to an
	opensource OCR program.  I'm pretty sure there are a couple in
	ports.  IIRC, though, the images have to be jpegs of tiffs or the
	like.  If anybody knows, please give me a shout out!

	gary

-- 
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