On Mon August 29 2005 3:30 am, FX Fraipont wrote:
Gil Weber wrote:
FX, perhaps this is a silly question, but in doing it as you recommend is it possible to preserve any of the .pdf formatting? I tried this with a bank statement and the result was a long OpenOffice document with everything jammed against the left margin. All of the columns of numbers that displayed so nicely in the .pdf were dismembered.
The resulting text document was unusable.
You don't preserve all of the formatting, but to say that it is unusable is certainly an exaggeration. I have just tried it on an official examination paper questionnaire, and you lose the graphic at the beginning of the paper and you'd have to add line seaparators and tabs, but it is certainly usable to me. By the way, Maura's original request was "txt - ascii"
I guess "unusable" is in the eyes of the beholder. ;o) I used the "save as text" command in Adobe Reader 7. Well, my bank statement has 9 columns (headings) with numbers below each heading. All 9 columns end up one on top of the other against the left margin. The only way to use the document is to reconstruct it using line separators and tabs (as you suggested). But the amount of work on a document such as this bank statement is beyond consideration. Perhaps line separators and tabs might be considered for a .pdf that contained only text in paragraph form (i.e., a document created using MS Word). That I can see might be fairly easy to reconstruct. I was hoping that there might be a relatively quick and easy way to do it for a document made up mostly of columns and rows. Perhaps there is not. Thanks. I appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. ;o) Gil