22 Dec
2009
22 Dec
'09
6:51 a.m.
On 21 Dec 2009 at 20:35, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
> I have about 100,000 lines of code in over 3 dozen
PDF files that were
> scanned from the hard copy listings. Unfortunately, the original text
> source files were lost, so the PDF files are a last resort. Other
> than typing in the code by hand from the PDF file, are there any good
> freeware programs to convert a PDF back to a text file?
Jerome,
As the link Chuck gave you talked about, there's a big difference
depending on how the PDF's were created originally. You need to find
out if the PDF was created from images, or created from Word or some
other text editor(or text source.)
You can tell the difference by trying to select some text in Adobe
Reader. Right-click the document and pick the "Select Tool." Then try
to select some text, if the whole document turns blue (selected), then
it was converted from a scan, otherwise you can probably just cut and paste.
If converted from a scan, you'll need to OCR it. I've had pretty good
results with machine printed code, but given the age/scan quality/print
quality can vary the results considerably. See my previous post on what
I use to OCR.
Keith