Parse PDF into tiddlers

[tib...@sunyit.edu]

Hi All,

I figured this may be a stretch but wanted to ask, is their any way to import a PDF into plain text tiddlers?

Thanks

[TonyM]

Such a tool would be helpful.

Personally I would look into tools to turn pdfs into text then import that, because there a many issues going from a highly formatted document type to plain text. Not to mention text inside images where some OCR is needed.

Foxit reader and Pro is great for pdf work but not sure it will help you.

Regards
Tony

[Jeremy Ruston]

The trouble with PDF is that, contrary to expectations, it is actually an image file format, rather than a text document format. In other words, it doesn’t know anything about paragraphs, or headers, or footers; all it knows about are simple instructions to draw a given letter at given coordinates. (Worse than that, some PDFs are actually just embedded bitmaps).

That means that converting a PDF into a conventional document is more akin to “optical character recognition” than ordinary file format conversion. It takes machine learning or sophisticated heuristics for software to figure out the structural relationships behind the document image. There is some effective software available to do this conversion, but it tends to be expensive because it’s such a hard problem and the capability is so valuable.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

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[tib...@sunyit.edu]

I found a tool that can convert a PDF textbook to epub, with minimal loss/corruption. Do we have an epub import tool lying around? I think Steve Schneider did something with epub in the spring.

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Epubs like docx files are assemblages. They are NOT really one file. They are wrappers. Find out how to UN-wrap it. See what you got in that specific epub format after unwrapping. Tell us what is in it. j.

[codacoder...@outlook.com]

On Wednesday, September 6, 2017 at 2:16:36 PM UTC-5, tib...@sunyit.edu wrote:

I found a tool that can convert a PDF textbook to epub, with minimal loss/corruption. Do we have an epub import tool lying around? I think Steve Schneider did something with epub in the spring.

epub is a zip file.  If you unzip an epub file it will show you (among other things) its raw html content.