Export part of PDF containing text

[Hamish28162468pc89]

Hi Adobe Support Community,

I am attempting to create an excel spreadsheet of recipes in one column and their ingredients in another; however, I find doing this manually very tedious.

Is it possible to use adobe to scan the page for the text "ingredients" and export only the following section to Excel? Perhaps column 1 would contain the recipe name and column 2 the list of exported ingredients.

Any support in resolving this issue is appreciated.

[gary_sc]

Hi @Hamish28162468pc89. My wife and I also tried a variety of things to maintain our recipes. One thing we tried early was using FileMaker Pro. I figured that way; we could easily search by food type, food group, meals, recipe type, etc. The problem was that when you create a fixed layout in something like FileMaker, it doesn't flex to allow for recipes that have variation in their structure. 

Personally, I think that Excel would not be productive for similar but very different structure dynamics for how Excel works.

We tried Word, which was OK but has a few idiosyncracies (sorry, it was so long ago I forget the specifics), and ended up using Adobe InDesign. Once I created a template, it was easy to work with. Then after each recipe was done, it was easy to PDF it (from within ID) and then add them to a Binder of other PDFs. Plus, it's easy to use "Organize Pages" to place entrees with the other entrees, Marinades with Marinades, etc. 

But doing this in Excel? I would vote against that approach. Maybe others might have a different take on this.

[try67]

It is possible, using a custom-made script, but it's not a trivial task.