2019-03-15 06:28:39

Hi all.
So I'm trying to convert various RPG rulebooks to plain text, and I was using the old PDF to TXT program from Empowerment Zone. Unfortunately, the 5th Edition Player's Handbook (and the monster manual as well) broke the program and I'm not about to upload a 90 meg PDF to one of those websites which take forever to convert the thing.
Are there any other programs I can use to convert these to text?

#FreeTheCheese
"The most deadly poison of our times is indifference. And this happens, although the praise of God should know no limits. Let us strive, therefore, to praise Him to the greatest extent of our powers." - St. Maximilian Kolbe

2019-03-15 07:48:19

you can get the the demo mode of q-read and convert at least some of it... I'm not completely sure how much text it let's you read with out paying for the full version. You could always get adobe acrobat reader, that usually does the trick.

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That Guy. Serving those people since that time. To contact, use that info.

2019-03-15 07:48:29

If you have Acrobat, you can go in file menu and export it to text file. I believe you can also open pdf in Word and then copy paste text to text file. If you are on Linux, there is a command line tool called pdftotext I used in the past with good results.

Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another. ― Lemony Snicket

2019-03-15 11:39:48

best way  use abbi fine reader

2019-03-15 12:51:02

What do you intend to do with the converted files? Do you want to retain formatting and other parameters of the original PDF books? If so, I think the best option is ABBYY Fine Reader.

2019-03-15 14:31:57

I myself use calibre for this. It's open source and available for windows and linux, possibly mac os too. It can convert pdfs and other formats into lots of stuff like html, rtf, txt. Should do the job very nicely and is totally free.

Roel
golfing in the kitchen

2019-03-15 14:55:32

Try with a program called Codex.

2019-03-15 23:08:46

Well, while we're on the topic of converting pdf's, I have here a 46 megabyte pdf, which contains a scanned image. Does anyone know of a free way I can convert this to text? All the sites I looked at seem to have a size limit.

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That Guy. Serving those people since that time. To contact, use that info.

2019-03-15 23:34:52

Just like for post 1, to post 8 too, try Codex. big_smile

2019-03-16 01:59:33 (edited by Thatguy 2019-03-16 04:16:58)

@9, I was presented with a blank text file after I used codex to try to convert my pdf image into text
Edit: But no matter. I found this pretty useful looking site that offers OCR converting for free. The formatting (lines, paragraphs, pages) isn't too terribly bad, but I'm not really concerned about that. If anyone else has this problem, here's the link:
https://document.online-convert.com/convert-to-txt

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That Guy. Serving those people since that time. To contact, use that info.

2019-03-16 14:36:59

Ugh, that's weird. For me it always worked, that's why i thought that would be a good solution...

2019-03-16 15:09:08

Thank God for calibre! I was able to convert the PDF's I have of the D&D Player's Handbook and the Dungion Master's Guide, as well as PDF's for Pathfinder and Starfinder. Now if I could only find my damned copy of the Monster Manual...

#FreeTheCheese
"The most deadly poison of our times is indifference. And this happens, although the praise of God should know no limits. Let us strive, therefore, to praise Him to the greatest extent of our powers." - St. Maximilian Kolbe