Excellent. Thanks. I actually had a solution from Adobe. They have a plug-in for reader that converts the text to an ASCII file. It is normally to be used for visually impaired people. They run this routine and then run the generated ASCII file through a speak synthesis program and the file is read to them.

But this is better for my use
.

Thanks again,

Joe


>>Hello.
>>
>>We have some PDF files that contain data. They are actually drug schedules (formularies), but the important fact is that there is information in the files that we would like to extract.
>>
>>Does anyone know how to read a PDF file? I can view/print the file with Acrobat Reader, but I am unable to extract the raw data. I tried printing to a file with the generic test only print driver, but that doesn't work. I think the letters are all printed like graphics.
>>
>>Does anyone know how to convert PDF files to an image file? As a less-favourable solution, we could OCR an image file to get the information.
>>
>>Any help would be appreciated,
>>Joe
>
>Make sure you have the latest version of acrobat reader (something like 4.x). In that version there should be a text select tool on the toolbar or under the edit menu there is a select all option. You can then cut and paste into a text editor or something. Usually the text doesn't cut and paste just like it is displayed but you can usually work with it.
>
>I got a fixed width delimited file in a pdf doc and successfully extracted to data using cut and paste. It wasn't easy because after I pasted the text it lost all the blank spaces so I had to run some parsing routines but I eventually got it. Also the retail version of Adobe Acrobat can do alot more than the reader but you should be able to cut and paste out of the reader.
>
>Of course all this depends on the way the document was created. If the doc was originally an image than all the pdf has is the image but if the doc had text in it usually you can get the text out.