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Participant
September 9, 2018
Answered

bulk conversion of PDF files?

  • September 9, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 2940 views

I have 231,353 cast vote record PDF files. Short of manually opening each file in Acrobat and exporting it, is there a way to convert these files to text or CSV, either as individual files or as one large file? Or is there an API I can use to access the data from the PDF files? Would prefer using perl.

Thank you.

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Correct answer john_kesich

Looks like

codeproject.com/Articles/7056/Code-to-extract-plain-text-from-a-PDF-file

will get me on my way. I suspect some assembly will be required.

3 replies

john_kesichAuthorCorrect answer
Participant
September 26, 2018

Looks like

codeproject.com/Articles/7056/Code-to-extract-plain-text-from-a-PDF-file

will get me on my way. I suspect some assembly will be required.

Erik Lord
Inspiring
September 10, 2018

You can try to setup a 'watch' folder. I did this many years ago for a similar need, but not nearly as many documents.

I'm not positive this will still work, but worth a search:

https://www.google.com/search?q=acrobat+watch+folder

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 10, 2018

Acrobat doesn't support watched folders of any kind. Distiller does, though.

Participant
September 11, 2018

The Distiller documentation only mentions converting Postscript to PDF. Since the files I have are PDF, I don't see how Distiller would help...

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 9, 2018

That's way too much for Acrobat to be able to handle in a single process.

I don't know about Perl, but I've developed tools in Java that can process large amounts of files in this way.

If you're interested in purchasing such a tool feel free to contact me privately via try6767 at gmail.com .