[OS X TeX] pdf -> text

[Arun]

On Tuesday, November 12, 2002, at 08:09 AM, Jan Erik Moström wrote:
> Are there any *free* tools for converting pdf documents to text files?

Some pdf's don't work very well with Ghostscript. So, what I do is print 
the PDF to a postscript file FROM Preview NOT Acrobat. Then I use 
"pstotext" to convert the postscript file to text. I'm not quite sure 
how I got "pstotext" ... probably Fink. Command-line Postcript utilities 
are very useful to have around in any case ...

The problems with the above approach is that special characters are 
omitted.

To get around this, you could copy&paste page-by-page from the free 
Acrobat. Very time-consuming, but free. Character substitution to ASCII 
is better.  The paid Acrobat, of course, has a text export ...

- Arun


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