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Read PDF contents to rename file

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 1:22 pm
by web3dprint
I'm looking for a way to read a section of a PDF file to use it as the name for such file. The text would be in a Text element, so no need to do OCR or anything like that.

I thought that by using PitStop Pro i can read the contents of a Text element, but it does not seem possible. Do you have any other suggestion?

Re: Read PDF contents to rename file

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 3:25 pm
by gabrielp
PDFSpy can do that and it has an integration for Switch. It's a paid software you can buy from Apago. Not sure how its done with Pitstop.

Re: Read PDF contents to rename file

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 7:58 pm
by Zoranj
Another suggestion is to save PDF as txt file and read it that way, perhaps using Regex to match what you need.

Re: Read PDF contents to rename file

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 8:38 pm
by web3dprint
Zoranj wrote:Another suggestion is to save PDF as txt file and read it that way, perhaps using Regex to match what you need.
Hmm that sounds interesting… how would you save to txt from a PDF? Never seen that before

Re: Read PDF contents to rename file

Posted: Wed Aug 09, 2017 12:06 am
by Zoranj
Easy:
Use Acrobat configurator out of the box, set output to be txt file.
Less easy but better (IMHO):
In my experience Acrobat works but was not the most stable, often crashing and not responding when processing many files.
Therefore wherever I used Acrobat, I replaced it with XPDF or PDFTk, depending on what I need.
Never looked back.

I hope this helps