convert a scanned PDF to text

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I work on classified systems and we need to copy some source code to an unclassified machine. Using any media other than printed copy is forbidden (no cdrom, thumb drive, etc). I tried PDFXchange and it was out right terrible. I had copied the text from Visual Studio, converted it all to an OCR font, set font size to 14, printed, scanned, and the PDFXchange was riddled with errors.
Have you any suggestions?

Edit: Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov suggested I scan to text. Good Point. My Epson 3640 printer does not scan to text, just pdf, jpeg, bitmap, and tiff. If someone knows of a utility that will work with those I will try it.

Posted 4-Sep-15 14:10pm

bkelly13

Updated 4-Sep-15 15:53pm

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 4-Sep-15 21:08pm

Don't scan to PDF, it's hard to work with, always scan to text.
—SA

RedDk 5-Sep-15 13:47pm

Spring for Adobe Acrobat Pro (v.9 or better).

Does everything. The format was/is proprietary Adobe. You'll see the light. Just pay for some software.

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Patrice T · Answer 1 · 2015-09-04T15:51:00

In a time before internet, I remember Apple exchanging programs between Macs via printed 2d barcode on simple sheets of paper.

Would it fit your need ?

In any case you need to scan to a lossless picture format, avoid jpeg which downgrade the scan to improve compression, which turn makes it more difficult to the OCR to deal with it.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 2 · 2015-09-04T16:18:00

I suggest you scan to TIFF (best) or JPEG. Then you can use some OCR software to recognize those bitmap into plain text. PDF is the worst option. Chances are, your scanner does not provide any OCR and save data as bitmap inside PDF. If its software really performs OCR, and you have no options, getting text from PDF is painful. Manually, you can simply copy/paste data as text, but kill that dreadful Adobe software. For Windows, I would recommend Sumatra PDF, the ones used on Linux are just fine.

If you really want to parse PDF programmatically, you have to specify your platform, the languages you use, and so on.

I don't know what OCR you have, so further detail depends on that. Getting away from PDF would be the best option.

—SA

convert a scanned PDF to text

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