On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 02:39:14AM +0100, cpghost wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Nov 2007 16:38:55 -0800
> Gary Kline <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > A couple weeks ago I skimmed thru the postings on editing PDF
> > files. Wasn't entirely clear what the answer it because I
> > never thought I would need to edit a GUI file. I just found a book
> > from 1883 in pdf format. I would like a text/ASCII/ISO_8859-1
> > version. Tried pfdtotext, but it doesn't work. Nutshell: is
> > there something I can use to edit/look-at this book and get
> > rid of whateveriit is that's causing pdftotext to fail. (sorry for
> > the grammar.... )
>
> Old books in PDF are normally scanned bitmaps. There are no characters
> or whatever therein; just pixels (EPS files). If you want to convert
> that to ASCII, you'd need to extract the EPS files (use something like
> pdfimages from the xpdf port), turn them into some bitmap format, and
> run some kind of OCR software on that. It's a slow, unreliable,
> error-prone and painful process though.
>
> Good luck!
"Arrrgh" (Charlie Brown). If it's that tortured, I'll forget
it; thanks for the clue. Pretty sure this *was* just phot'd and
scanned in.
(Much be how amazon.com has thir zillions of boooks online.
OCR'ing is serious work; I know that first hand.)
gary
>
> -cpghost.
>
> --
> Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/
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--
Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.thought.org Public Service Unix
http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org
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