I am currently working on an open source project called GOOP. GOOP chews up documents and other text forms in order to create metadata. This metadata is compared and shared over a P2P network (via JXTA) and the GOOP application automatically performs data comparisons (via the metadata) with nodes that it encounters. PDF files present a challenge because I need some way to convert them to text so an access them with GOOP.


What I need: An open source script or binary to convert PDF files to text. I would love it if it was in Java but at this point I'll take anything.


Many thanks to any and all who can help.....

Lim.

goop.jxta.org

**Reposted from Linux Software section***

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/about.html it includes a utility to extract .pdf to .txt

never used it, your mileage may vary

As far as I know, PDF is not a format that should be convertable to text, because that would allow people to tamper with the original document. You can publish a PDF or PS document with OOo Writer, but thankfully you can't do anything about editing an existing PDF.

... unless you have the adobe writer ... even then poorly made PDFs (ie - scanned) won't be editable.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/convert...ormat-command/ has a walk-through on using pdftotext on linux.