User Tool w/ PDF's

[Gregory Dietrich]

You know, I was thinking that it would be super cool if somehow you were able to incorporate PDF files into Accordance. Sort of the same way one would import HTML into a user tool, you might be able to use OCR with a PDF and import it. What do you think?

[Martin Shields]

Devon Technologies have a free product called PDF2RTF Service which lets you open PDF files in any Cocoa application (they just appear in the "Open..." dialogue). So, for example, TextEdit can open a PDF and all the text is converted to editable text.

 

Although you cannot use this directly with Accordance (since it isn't Cocoa and isn't likely to be for at least the near term), you could open a PDF in Pages and export it as HTML, then import that to Accordance. Although you may need to do some hand editing, it does save lots of re-typing.

[Alistair]

Martin,

 

Have you actually done it this way, and if so was it straightforward?

 

I downloaded this utility but it doesn't seem to work with Pages 2.

 

Opening a PDF with TextEdit worked fine, so far.

 

~Alistair

[Martin Shields]

Alistair,

 

You are correct, it doesn't seem to work with Pages. I have used it with TextEdit, so it is still possible to convert PDFs into a format readable by Accordance, it may just take a few steps.

[Alistair]

The problem I'm finding is that this method puts linefeeds/carriage returns at the end of every line of text.

 

There are methods and ways of speeding up converting these, except it doesn't recognise paragraph breaks.

 

I wonder if this is generic to this method of conversion or if it is dependent on the original PDF.

 

~Alistair