richardthinks (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} richardthinks) wrote,@ 2008-04-10 12:36:00 |
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PSA: pdf to rtf made easy
Oh my god. How have I lived for this long without knowing about Devon Technologies' PDF2RTFService 1.1?
Let's say you have a mac, and access to JSTOR and other e-archives and journal services that pump out .pdfs, and you want those rendered into machine-readable text, so you can copy and paste rather than painstakingly typing quotes, or have your computer read documents out to you as you drive, f'rinstance.
You could spend hours and hours of your life with an expensive OCR program like ReadIRIS, first loading the documents up and then having it recognise them, slowly, painfully and unstably. Or you could download PDF2RTFService for free, pop it in your library and then just open your pdfs as machine readable text in textedit or other programs. I've tested it, it works. Most of the time, with documents that readIRIS would be able to read. Some 18th century stuff is beyond it, as is some stuff with crazy formatting. But in general it Just Works in the most amazingly invisible way.
Imagine you wanted to listen to and/or write comments straight into your copy of Charles van den Heuvel's recent reconstruction of Simon Stevin's 1605 opus on architecture, de Huysbou, f'rinstance. Why you could just drag and drop the 500-page pdf right onto textedit and plug away.
I'm not saying you would - that might violate some copyright terms that I'm at best hazy on - but you could, and it would most certainly advance the cause of knowledge, is all.
Did y'all know about this for years and just keep quiet about it?
Oh my god. How have I lived for this long without knowing about Devon Technologies' PDF2RTFService 1.1?
Let's say you have a mac, and access to JSTOR and other e-archives and journal services that pump out .pdfs, and you want those rendered into machine-readable text, so you can copy and paste rather than painstakingly typing quotes, or have your computer read documents out to you as you drive, f'rinstance.
You could spend hours and hours of your life with an expensive OCR program like ReadIRIS, first loading the documents up and then having it recognise them, slowly, painfully and unstably. Or you could download PDF2RTFService for free, pop it in your library and then just open your pdfs as machine readable text in textedit or other programs. I've tested it, it works. Most of the time, with documents that readIRIS would be able to read. Some 18th century stuff is beyond it, as is some stuff with crazy formatting. But in general it Just Works in the most amazingly invisible way.
Imagine you wanted to listen to and/or write comments straight into your copy of Charles van den Heuvel's recent reconstruction of Simon Stevin's 1605 opus on architecture, de Huysbou, f'rinstance. Why you could just drag and drop the 500-page pdf right onto textedit and plug away.
I'm not saying you would - that might violate some copyright terms that I'm at best hazy on - but you could, and it would most certainly advance the cause of knowledge, is all.
Did y'all know about this for years and just keep quiet about it?
