[Tutor] PDF to text conversion

bob gailer bgailer at gmail.com
Tue Apr 21 18:54:36 CEST 2009


Robert Berman wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I must convert a history file in PDF format that goes from May of 1988 
> to current date.  Readings are taken twice weekly and consist of the 
> date taken mm/dd/yy and the results appearing as a 10 character 
> numeric + special characters sequence. This is obviously an easy setup 
> for a very small database  application with the date as the key, the 
> result string as the data.
>
> My problem is converting the PDF file into a text file which I can 
> then read and process. I do not see any free python libraries having 
> this capacity. I did see a PDFPILOT program for Windows but this 
> application is being developed on Linux and should also run on 
> Windows; so I do not want to incorporate a Windows only application.
>
> I do not think i am breaking any new frontiers with this application. 
> Have any of you worked with such a library, or do you know of one or 
> two I can download and work with? Hopefully, they have reasonable 
> documentation.

If this is a one-time conversion just use the save as text feature of 
adobe reader.

>
> My development environment is:
>
> Python
> Linux
> Ubuntu version 8.10
>
>
> Thanks for any help  you might be able to offer.
>
>
> Robert Berman
> _______________________________________________
> Tutor maillist  -  Tutor at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
>


-- 
Bob Gailer
Chapel Hill NC
919-636-4239


More information about the Tutor mailing list