Phil Addison wrote:
On Sun, 08 Jan 2006 20:30:37 +0000, in uk.d-i-y Chris Bacon
wrote:


Phil Addison wrote:

Bob Eager wrote:

Phil Addison wrote:

I have some pdf files that I want to pull into excel but they have the
copy feature disabled so all I can do is save or print them. Does anyone
know of software that can extract the data? Preferably shareware or
freeware of course.

You could try Ghostview (GSView) and GhostScript...Google for more..

I tried to instal those once before but got hopelessly lost with what
version to use and which bits to install or leave out. Is there an easy
way for XP or W2000?

Try again, its not rocket science.


Yippee success. many thanks all of you for the ideas. The one that
worked for me was GhostScript.

went to http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/, clicked Obtaining AFPL
Ghostscript 8.53

Installed for GhostScript Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 or XP
gs853w32.exe, AFPL Ghostscript 8.53 for Win32.
gsv47w32.exe, GSview 4.7 for Win32

Powered up GhostScript. Got a command prompt - Arggh
Tried GSview

Lovely intuitive (almost) GUI. Loaded my file. Clicked Extract Text and
saved.

Got everything in txt form - wonderful. Of course each table cell is on
a new line.

So where is my VI crib sheet. Will be doing some neat sed-ing for the
next hour or so to regenerate CSV format.

You may get somewhere with outputting as .pdf again (file | export as
PDF - or something like that)

Chris

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