How to turn a PDF into an editable text document using Adobe Acrobat and gmail February 21, 2008
Posted by esanders in : How To, Uncategorized, Windows XP , add a commentEver have a PDF with text on it that you wanted to ‘extract’ or edit? Let’s say you’ve scanned in a list of names and addresses and now want to take that information and put it into an Excel spreadsheet. Here’s how to pull that text out of that PDF so you can edit it:
IN ADOBE ACROBAT 7.0:
Step 1: Open the PDF and make sure it is right-side up. If it is not, rotate it by clicking on the DOCUMENT menu and then ROTATE PAGES.
Step 2: In the DOCUMENT menu, go to RECOGNIZE TEXT USING OCR, then START. Select ALL PAGES and hit OK. This should recognize the text in the file and realign the document.
Step 3: Save the file. You aren’t done yet!
IN GMAIL:
Step 4: E-mail the file to yourself at your gmail e-mail address. You’ll need gmail for this, as it seems to be the only e-mail system that can open PDFs as text files.
Step 5: In gmail, instead of downloading the PDF attachment, hit VIEW AS HTML. Voila, you now have text that you can copy and paste into any other program!