PDF->TXT

[dMores]

hello friends,

the topic of this thread looks simple, but it's not :)

a friend of mine is an author, and he's published his first book.
he gave me one of the first copies, with signature, dedication and all.

anyhow, my problem is I CAN'T READ PAPER BOOKS ANYMORE.
it takes me a month to get past 10 pages.

so, i asked him to send me the electronic version of the book he sent to his publisher.
and i got a PDF file. great, i thought, convert to mobipocket, transfer to my phone and read.

BUT: the PDF is kind of screwed up, since it has 2 pages on one pdf-page.
you know, it's already formated for printing.
so when i convert to text, i get the first row of page 1, and the first row of page 2, then second row of page one, second row of page 2.

needless to say, it's completely unreadable.

is there a way to split the PDF in two, create a "even numbers.pdf" and "odd numbers.pdf", then compine those two to form a final document that i can convert to PRC ?

i mean, i could try to crop with adobe acrobat, but how do i get a pdf to take the even pages from "even.pdf" and odd pages from "odd.pdf"?

my friend is pretty pissed that i haven't read it yet, it's been out for more than a year, and his constant side-swipes at "the ungrateful friend who can't even find time to read a friend's book" are getting on my nerves :)

oh, it's a good book, at least that's what other people have said :)

i'd share it, but it's in german too.

HELP :)

[Steve Jordan]

There is a way to deal with this problem, though it's only slightly less cumbersome than reorganizing every other line of text.

The full version of Acrobat has a function called "Crop Pages" (under the "Document" menu). This allows you to trim any or all sides of a page to suit. Using Crop Pages, you can:

1. Crop the right page away, and be left with the left page and text only.
2. Copy left page and paste into text app.
3. Back in the Acrobat menu, execute either Edit, Undo, or File, Revert, to recover right page. (Undo will return you to the page you just cropped, while Revert will take you back to the beginning of the doc.)
4. Repeat steps 1-3 to remove left page and copy right page.
5. Have a drink, and keep going 'til you're done.
(Note: You can trim ALL right pages automatically at once and do your copy-paste, then ALL left pages at once and copy-paste, but you'll want to paste left and right page text into separate files, then stitch them together into a new file. If your pasted text gives you convenient breaks, this might not be as bad as it sounds...)

I know, it ain't much of a solution (in my job I often have to use this to copy PDF pages set in columns into a text or HTML app, and it can suck). But it does beat copying and pasting one line at a time, especially with a large text.

Another possibility:

1. Using the same crop tools, create your left pages and right pages, and save each file.
2. Use the Advanced, Page Number controls to change the page numbers of one of the docs, say, adding the letter "a" to each page number, and save it.
3. Import one file into the other at the beginning or end (using Document, Insert Pages).
4. Then you (brace yourself) use the Pages View window to reorganize the pages by dragging and dropping. Use the original numbers of one (1, 2, 3) and the prefixes of the second (a1, a2, a3) to make combining them visually easier (1, a1, 2, a2, 3, a3).

Another lousy method, but when you're done, you can copy and paste the thing into a text app without having to reorganize.

[dMores]

oh boy :(

308 pages to crop ?

sheesh !

i guess i won't be able to get around doing it manually. will experiment with cropping and saving 2 PDF files, one for even, one for odd, and always copying one page and pasting it into the final word document.

thanks for the clarification that there IS NO AUTOMATIC SOLUTION.

*cry*

[Steve Jordan]

I know, I've shed many a tear over this myself (be sure to re-read first message, in which I added to a second solution).