On 23 Mar 98 at 18:28, Bill Cohane wrote:

> At 10:27 23-03-98 -0800, Dave Gillett wrote:
>
> >  It's fundamentally impractical to extract text from a .PDF file for
> >other use; it's effectively read-only.  [I speak from personal
> >experience with internals of the format.]  Again, this is acceptable
> >and even desirable to some creators of documents, but limits document
> >usefulness.
>
> But you can still "copy and paste" text from a PDF file by using the
> "abc" button in Acrobat Reader to activate the "text selection" curser.

  That's true, although the process loses all formatting -- even
paragraph breaks.  It's barely adequate for quoting a sentence or
two.

> Or did you mean that it is impractical to use some kind of conversion
> program to convert (all the text) from PDF to TXT?

  Adobe obviously *could* write one, using some of the pieces that go
into Acrobat Reader.  Anyone else would have to recreate most of
those components from scratch, and it's unlikely that such an effort
would ever pay for itself.

David G