>>Someone sent us a PDF that was from a scanned image. The quality is poor at best. It is mostly text and that is what I care about. Any way to improve the quality to make it more readable? Using just Adobe Reader 8.1 to view the PDF.
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>Check PDFToText free utility.
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>Re: Extract text from PDF Thread #1217313 Message #1217317

Hmm, I suspect the PDF file does not contain any text per se that could be extracted via a utility like PDFToText; I'm guessing it contains only the original scanned image. It might be possible to:

- use one of the utilities in XPDF to extract the image from the PDF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xpdf
- then, use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract the text from the image
- once the text has been extracted it can be printed/viewed "perfectly" via NotePad, Word etc.

There are some free OCR packages such as SimpleOCR ( http://www.simpleocr.com/ ) that could help here. Some non-free programs such as the full version of Adobe Acrobat have workflow features that help automate this kind of thing if you do it a lot.