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Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:36:48 -0800
From: Charlie Kester <corky1951@comcast.net>
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Subject: Re: can i split a pdf file?
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On Mon 26 Jan 2009 at 00:16:23 PST Polytropon wrote:
>On Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:06:18 -0800, Gary Kline <kline@thought.org> wrote:
>> 	Thanks, Gents,
>> 
>> 	But according to one smallish pdf file that I send to a web based
>> 	tool, it was not a real pdf.  Or, more accurately, it (the pdf to 
>> 	speech program) couldn't decode it.
>
>This is a typical problem with "poorly engineered" PDFs where the
>author puts in the text as images (you'll see this stupidity across
>the Web, too).

In most cases where I've seen this, it's because they had scanned an
actual printed document.  Many old, out-of-print books are being made
newly available this way, so I'm not inclined to complain.

Unfortunately, OCR software still isn't reliable enough (or, if
reliable, cheap enough) to convert these scanned images to actual text.