Hi Matt, Caroline, Erik, Jon, and Others,
Tim Kilburn answered this question a couple of months ago, but at the time
someone was looking for a command line tool. The message was short, so I'll
just paste it in:
<begin quote>
From: Tim Kilburn
Subject: Re: converting pdf with the command-line
Date: February 27, 2011
Hi William,
Try the pdftotext Shell tool found at:
http://www.bluem.net/en/mac/others/
I've had success with this tool. It will place a text version of your pdf into
the same location as the original pdf document. It will not translate
protected PDFs.
<end quote>
Although the description on that page states "If you don’t know what “Terminal”
is, please do not download this package—you won’t need it." it should be
possible to set this up for use in a GUI environment. Even in Terminal, all I
have to do is type:
pdftotext <filename>.pdf
and when I press the "Return" key a new file named <filename>.txt gets created
in the same lcoation. That's a little simplified, because I think by default
the program gets placed into
/usr/local/bin/pdftotext
If someone wants to do this entirely from the GUI interface, you could use
Automator's ability to run AppleScripts after downloading the pdftotext
program. In Automator you would select the "Run AppleScript" action from the
Utilities library. (I'm not certain, but I believe the default setting when
you launch Automator is to have the top level "Library" of actions selected, in
which case you need only navigate to the search box (Command-Option-F to do
this quickly), and type in "Run AppleScript" to filter results. Then all you
need to do is navigate to the table of action results and interact. I think
this is called "Actions description Split View, Split Group". Interact, then
navigate to the actions table and interact to find the single "Run
AppleScript" result. Navigate to the "Run AppleScript" action and press
"Return" to add this to your Automator Workflow. Stop interacting with the
tables and navigate to the "Run AppleScript" action in your workflow.
The default content of the "Run AppleScript" action will be:
<begin quote>
on run {input, parameters}
(* Your script goes here *)
return input
end run
<end quote>
I've input instead:
<begin quote>
(*
Use pdftotext to create a text version of the selected PDF file
Created 17 May 2011
*)
on run
tell application "Finder"
set chosenFile to the selection as alias
end tell
do shell script "/usr/local/bin/pdftotext " & quoted form of POSIX path
of chosenFile
end run
<end quote>
When you run the Automator action (Command-R), your selected file in Finder
will be acted on by pdftotext, and a text version of the file will be created
in the same directory. So if you selected a file named "Example.pdf" and ran
the Automator workflow, it would create an "Example.txt" file in the same
directory. You can save the workflow as an application (e.g., Command-Shift-S,
then set the pop up to "Application" and choose a name like "mypdftotext" and
put it in your Applications folder).
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
On May 17, 2011, at 09:07, Jon Cohn wrote:
> There is a half off special from mac update today for a PDF converter.
> Haven't had time to look at it, but perhaps there is a free demo version, and
> then if it does what you need then you could purchas it.
> On May 17, 2011, at 12:38 PM, carolyn Haas wrote:
>
>> Erik:
>> With all due respect, I don't think I have enough know how to do that. I'm
>> just a fledgling geek with big ideas.:)
>>
>> Or, perhaps I have my hands full enough with things as they are.:)
>>
>>
>> On May 17, 2011, at 9:29 AM, Erik Heil wrote:
>>
>>> Hi.
>>> What's preventing you from building pdf2txt from source? I'm pretty sure
>>> it'll build cleanly under OSS. Thanks to gnu autoconf and friends. If
>>> you're not comfortable with building from sources, the fink project may
>>> have what you want. By default, it installs stuff under /opt/sw. So if you
>>> ever don't want fink software, it's easy to just rm -f the whole tree, and
>>> no more fink stuff on your machine. Also, no conflicts with binaries or
>>> libraries shipped with OSS. So no potential for broken software or tools.
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPad
>>>
>>> On May 17, 2011, at 11:00 AM, Chris Moore <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Sertek Docuscan Plus?
>>>> On 17 May 2011, at 15:57, carolyn Haas wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi Matt and others:
>>>>> I believe you can do this with pages, and possibly with Stanza, though
>>>>> someone with more experience can verify this. I have a related question:
>>>>> If someone sends a mail attachmentthat appears as pdf images, and I
>>>>> don't have Abbyy, is there any way to access it's contents other than
>>>>> printing the image, scanning it with my PC and reading it there? I just
>>>>> don't feel Abbyy will meet my needs enough to make the purchase
>>>>> worthwhile.
>>>>> I'm hoping someone has a better idea.:)
>>>>> Thoughts?
>>>>>
>>>>> Carolyn
>>>>>
>>>>> On May 17, 2011, at 8:46 AM, Matt Dierckens wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi list,
>>>>>> I was wondering if there is an app that will convert pdf files to text
>>>>>> files like pdf2txt on windows. Thanks.
>>>>>> Matt
>>>>>>
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