Re: Will Ghostscript let me dump plain text out of a PostScript file?

["Dov Isaacs" <isaacs@xxxxxxxxx>]

Deborah,

I don't know what GhostScript would do for you in this case.
Certainly, you can output PostScript from Acrobat or Acrobat Reader
but that won't help regenerate your text.

There are a few Acrobat plugins that are available that can extract
large amounts of text from PDF files. Rudimentary descriptions of these
plugins and pointers to their authors are on the Adobe web site.

With regards to the "capture" part of Acrobat under Windows the capture 
function still exists under Acrobat 4.05, the same way it did under 
Acrobat 3.0x. Nothing was taken away from the product in terms of capture
functionality. Are you perchance referring to the Mac or what? 
And Acrobat Capture by itself wouldn't solve your problem of getting
text out of PDF files if that is what your <rant mode> is about.

        - Dov


At 1/17/2001 03:49 PM, Deborah Snavely wrote:
>Situation: 
>Legacy documentation exists in PDF format ONLY. Source files not
>available, or at least not fast, not necessarily, and not before we need
>them (which was last November). 
>
>It's not our legacy doc, I don't CARE about getting the Frame styles out
>of it now, and I'm prepared to do a worst-case olden days ASCII dump and
>grunt text clean-up in Frame. My other option is to hire a contractor to
>start typing into our template, and that'll take me more time to get
>authorized. 
>
>I've heard about Ghostscript a hundred times on this list, and hunted it
>up online but cannot determine from any of its home pages or
>documentation whether it or GSview will let me SAVE the PS it displays. 
>
>Deborah Snavely
>
>P.s.    <rant mode on>
>
>Adobe has betrayed my confidence by packaging Acrobat Capture separately
>from the Acrobat 4.0 "full product", sigh, and I need this PDF content
>now (Yesterday. Last week.) to dump into our latest Frame template and
>start rebranding doc for an acquired product. (The release was last
>Monday.) 
>
>Lesson: if your company ever acquires some other software firm, go right
>to the top and start buttonholing people as soon as you hear about it.
>Even the selling techies insisted that the source Frame files for
>product doc were on the build server...lie. If we hadn't been OEM-in
>this thing before we bought 'em, we wouldn't even have the PDF files!


** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@omsys.com **
** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **