Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 17:54:53 -0800 From: Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org> To: cpghost <cpghost@cordula.ws> Cc: Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: pdf edit again. Message-ID: <20071104015453.GA64050@thought.org> In-Reply-To: <20071104023914.3fabd2e7@epia-2.farid-hajji.net> References: <20071104003851.GA98655@thought.org> <20071104023914.3fabd2e7@epia-2.farid-hajji.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 02:39:14AM +0100, cpghost wrote: > On Sat, 3 Nov 2007 16:38:55 -0800 > Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org> 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/ > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" -- Gary Kline kline@thought.org www.thought.org Public Service Unix http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20071104015453.GA64050>