Re: [libreoffice-users] Scanned and OCR's PDF to text

Leo -

Under Linux there's a utility 'pdftotext' that might be able to produce 
a .txt file with the plain-text contents of your PDF file. I don't know 
what's available under Windows (if that's what you're using).

(You say 'text in a Draw file... Is that useful?' – by their nature, 
draw programmes (unlike paint programmes) do retain the original text of 
whatever appears graphically.)

- Robert

On 2025-06-08 19:45, Leo L te Braake wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Subject says it all: I found a book  >200 pages of genealogical data
> (Papal Zouave army 1860-70). There's a good quality PDF in the BNF
> Gallica, and a worse one I found on Geneanet. But: this one has been
> OCRed. My own OCR-capaity has only one limit, but it is an extremely low
> one.
>
> I need the data in a database or spreadsheet.  That's not very
> difficult:  been there, done that. but most of the times my workhorse
> from the last 30 year,MS Office, was sufficient.   But to get to my
> target, I need a textfile to apply a series of S&R commands to turn it
> into .CSV,  a route with no problems for me.
>
> 1. Adobe can't export or 'save as' the PDF, because it's somehow 
> protected.
> 2. Microsoft (Word 2007 and 2016) can't open it or import it because it
>    is Microsoft, and can't be botered
> 3. I tried to open the PDF in LibreOffice, and when dinner was
>    finished, so was LO: it had fabricated a Big Beatiful Bill File.
>
> This file sat  in a nameless window overlaying LO Draw. I am not
> proficient in LO, and this was the first time I encountered such a
> floating window. It appeared that I could select a page in the file,
> click on it and have the graphic image selected. Delete and only the
> text remained. NB: text in a Draw file... Is that useful?
> But it also proved error-prone: sometimes I deleted not the graphic
> image, but the whole page.  So besides this being a tedious and long
> process, this is just not the ideal way to handle say 250 pages.
>
>  * If somehow I get this text without the graphics in a LO Draw file,
>    will I be able to make a Writes file out of it?
>  * Is there a better route between the PDF and a .csv file?
>
>
> Leo 

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