As I mentioned John Delacour's GUI scripting solution will work fine for me. However, another approach might work on more complicated PDF documents.
At Shelly Spearing's suggestion I "looked at xpdf". In fact I installed "xpdf" and "pdftohtml" via darwinports. Now the command pdftohtml somefile.pdf will produce one or more html documents that I can be accessed with Perl. It might be easier to find things in this html code than in text copied from the original PDF file. This is just a thought; I haven't tried it. Regards, Vic On 3/23/07, at 3:52 PM -0700, Avi Rappoport wrote: > >If all that's needed is to copy the whole text of a pdf window and > >put it in a text file, then GUI scripting can be used. > > > This will work for some PDF files, but not all. Some have no text at > all (scanned only), and others the text has been generated badly, so > a two-column page will have text from column 1, line 1; then column > 2, line 1; then column 1, line 2... > > Sigh. > > Avi On 3/21/07, at 8:07 PM -0600, Shelly Spearing wrote: > Have you looked at xpdf? > See > http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/ > --Shelly
