Justin
this is among several means of getting text from PDF files.
There is also the plug-in for acrobat 4, and a couple shareware programs
The reliability and quality of the results produced by these methods
is, well, variable.
My general experience is that the quality of the results is inversly
proportional to the need, in other words, if you really
need tables paragraphs and the like, say for engineering
documentation, then you'll get garbage.   If it is not important,
then you'll get readable text.

 Almost all engineering and technical documentation published
in electronic format these days is in PDF. In any technical
documentation, all the truly important stuff is in tables. None
of these previously mentioned conversion methods produce readable
tables. So, none of them are at all good enough!

Particularly when, through marketing like Microsoft's or better, since sighties
just love Adobe, they have made PDF the publishing standard for the web, and
till perhaps now? have simply left blind folks out, I feel I have
the right to be loudly obnoxious about it. They have made my job
as a rehabilitation engineer very much more time consuming and
more difficult and frustrating than it need have been.

So, till I see REAL quality results, like with real paragraphs and
real tables which can be used to gain real information, then I will continue
to be quite obnoxious about it all.

And partial solutions don't cut the mustard.

"It's something" will not do any more.

but I have hope for accessible acrobat 5 and Windoweyes. which I
have comming soon.

Tom Fowle
Rehabilitation Engineer

Smith-Kettlewell Rehab Engineering Center
San Francisco


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