On Sat, 3 Nov 2007 17:54:53 -0800 Gary Kline <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 02:39:14AM +0100, cpghost wrote: > > On Sat, 3 Nov 2007 16:38:55 -0800 > > Gary Kline <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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.) If you need help on imperfectly OCR'ed texts, esp. on texts that are no longer copyrighted, there's always Distributed Proofreaders from the venerable Project Gutenberg: http://www.pgdp.net/ Good luck! -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 "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
