Re: PDF to Word Conversion Tool

Subject: Re: PDF to Word Conversion Tool
From: "CB Casper" <knowone -at- surfy -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 11:03:42 -0800


A technique for converting PDF tables
back into real tables obtains fairly clean
tables, not perfect, but it gets close.
The table positions in PDF are created
by the insertion of space characters.

1) Copy text into favorite word processor.
codes below are for Word.

2) Do a global search/replace for double
spaces and replace with single tabs, and
repeat until no more double spaces exist.

4) Do a global search/replace for double tabs
and replace with single tabs, until no single
tabs remain.

5) This will leave some stray single spaces
adjacent to tabs, so do a search/replace for
_ ^t_, and change to tab, repeat for _^t _.

Select each group of text and convert to table.
A macro for us programming challenged can easily
made to automate this task.

Some judgement needs to be made, along with some
adjustments for those awful multiple lines within
a cell tables. These ain't easy to convert as the
positioning of data is controlled by spaces and
data gets scrunched on the the same line. No easy
way for these cells. Adding some dummy text, such
as zzz manually to space the data to the correct
column position works. Easy to remove afterwards.

CB

--- >If you really need to put the data
--- >into tables and you have no access to
--- >the original document, the easiest and
--- >cheapest solution may be to pay someone
--- >to keyboard the data.
---
--- The trouble is that is that keying in
--- numerical data makes errors -- and he
--- has hundreds of pages to do.

--
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