Dana

I know there's freeware out there that will let you create a PDF from a Word doc. Is there anything that goes in reverse? Approximately three thousand of the source documents for my new project are PDFs, and my life would be a lot easier if they were editable.

Not freeware, but for under $200 bucks there is scanscoft, which has saved my life in terms of extracting large amounts of tabular data from pdfs. Will either translate the whole thing into word document with word tables, or just extract the tables as excel worksheets. One thing, while it does a pretty good job of preserving fonts and margins and such, you will lose minor amounts of formatting.

Bonus: much better at translating your word docs back into pdfs. Better options for creating lower resolution, smaller files for example or high quality publishing ready. Also some funky stuff with margins some of the free stuff does it does not.

I think Adobe Acrobat might be under $200 itself, isn't it?

Yup, I'm estimating high cause I don't remember the price. I actually think I paid $99, but don't remember the exact price. But Scanscoft will import pdfs and turn them into word - which is ten time better than acrobat for getting data out of them. If Dana is just editing, making minor content changes and such then acrobat is better, or even just replacing whole paragraphs. But with 5,000 source documents it sounds possible that Dana is actually consolidating data from multiple sources, or making other major chages. Believe me, being able to get stuff into excel and word, make your changes and then shoot it back into PDF is well worth the extra bucks - at least if the time-is-money-theory still counts for anything - unless the edits are really fairly minor.

t On Edit

But you were right to call me on it. I saw "5,000 source documents" and immediately assumed the kind of stuff that requires scansoft. But I should have asked - because it could well be simple changes where Acrobat is the best choice. Too long since I did user support.

The issue is that I am a contractor and therefore not able to spend anyone's money (except my own, and...no). Thanks for the info, though. I'll keep it for reference.

Build some Pdf handling software expense on your bid for the next contract you get that requires text handling. If you have one or two really bad ones you want turned into somethinge editable, you can e-mail them to me, have me return an editable form. Open Office which is free will do a great job of turning them back into PDFs for you. Obviously I'm not going to do that for 5,000 for you, but as I said if you have one or two bearcats.

The two free work arounds is that you can cut and paste stuff into word or export to text file. The text files lose all formating - usually include location of rows and columns in tables. Cut and paste preserves more - but often in extremely weird ways - like some fairly standard font text will paste into word as 72 point font and like that.

Oh a quick google reveals this:

[link]

Another software that converts PDF to word called "Solid" has a free trial version. It will convert 10% of a document to word (up to ten pages) but you can do this multiple times for a document until you convert the whole thing. The free trial is good for 15 days. Don't know if the the pita of 10% at a time is worth it, and have no idea how good solid is. But it is free for that 15 days.

[link]

Here is another one that does not expire and does not have 10% limitation. Adware- uses your browser to convert and pops ads on your browser. Again don't have faintest idea of quality.

Oh and scansoft PDF converter has a version that will do everythign most people will want for $50 [link]

My new MythTV setup appears to be working pretty well. Initially I had a problem the driver for the IR remote not loading on boot, but I fixed that by hacking rc.sysinit.

I'm getting my programming info and the pausing of live TV is working. Tonight I'll see if my scheduled recordings look okay and see if the automatic commercial removal really works.

Excellent, Gud -- keep us posted. I keep not quite getting around to doing a Myth box, but being tempted by the idea.

My Linux box does have a capture card in it, but I'm running out of cable outlets, and splitting does not make the waves happy.

Just as background info, I'm using a very basic computer a homebuilt PC with a Athlon-XP 2000+ processor, 512MB RAM, ATI-9550 card, onboard (VIA) ethernet, and sound. Then, a PVR-250 for TV input (and also provides the remote).

I'm using Fedora Core 4 for the base OS using this very useful guide: [link]

I had to do my JFS video partition manually since the Fedora installer would crap out if I did it with the partition tool in the installer, but otherwise it went pretty smoothly so far. The guide had the hack for loading the IR driver, but I found that after I had already fixed it myself.

Still have some stuff to do, setting up the web interface so I can schedule and review recordings from anywhere, seeing if my recorded programs are turning out right, and finally hooking it up to a TV (thought that involves a lot of work that isn't software related, like getting an ethernet cable up to the living room and quieting the computer)