Hi Daniel,
I'm sorry for the bad news, but if you open a PDF and get the message "empty document," it means the author produced a document which is only an image, and so its content is not accessible with a screen reader. The document must be processed by a piece of software which examines it in the same way that Openbook does when it processes the image the scanner captures. My suggestion is to first ask the author of the PDF to produce an accessible PDF which would contain the text already. As I mentioned to someone else on this list, this can be done quite easily using MS Word by simply saving the document as a PDF. If you cannot reach the author, you simply have no choice but to convert the document itself as I've already mentioned using OCR software, and you may need to make a financial commitment in order to be independent. Now, if your PDFs are not too large or too much work, and if the information is not confidential, I would be willing to run it through my OCR software, Kurzweil 1000. Keep in mind, though, that OCR programs are not perfect, and so you should not expect a perfect recognition of the PDF image. Please let me know if I can help any more than this. All the best, Rod From: Daniel Sweeney [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2014 8:02 PM To: 'Steve Sweeney' Cc: [email protected] Subject: RE: reading pdf's with "empty document" Hi, I am not sure how the documents were downloaded. They are a combination of narrative and financials and come from a website dealing with statistics on non-profit organizations. I need to examine all of the information contained in them, but am not sure what exactly you mean by running it through a OCR program. Would I save the PDF I downloaded from the site on to my computer and then open with another program? I have a very old version of Open Book, but have not used it in quite some time. I thought it was just for scanning documents and reading, not for reading PDF's that I download from another website. If there is a program I can download that will help me read these, is there possibly a free one somewhere? I have never had any issues with reading a PDF before, but will try something if it is not going to mean I have to purchase yet another program that I will use only occasionally. Not to mention I would rather spend the time on getting the information I need from the PDF rather than spending the time learning how to use a program to read the information I need that may or may not work. If that makes any sense. Thanks for your help. Daniel _____ From: Steve Sweeney [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2014 12:03 PM To: 'Daniel Sweeney' Subject: RE: reading pdf's with "empty document" Hi, Is there any way you can find out how these documents were generated? A lot of people like to scan in documents and save them as .pdf files. If that is the case you are going to have to run OCR on them to convert them to readable text. This isn't a dawting task just not 100% accurate. Let me know, if I can help you I will. Take care -Steve Sweeney From: Daniel Sweeney [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2014 11:17 AM To: [email protected] Subject: reading pdf's with "empty document" Hi, I know this topic has been brought up before, but I did not realize how soon I might need to pay attention to it. I need to research a few pdf documents, but when I download them, trying to read them with Adobe Reader, they appear as "a scanned image requiring OCR or a malformed document". At any rate, I cannot read them with WE, and need some help on what I need to do to be able to access these documents. They do appear on the screen, but I cannot even get WE to read when I roll the mouse over the page either. Any suggestions? Daniel If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv.
