Ways to extract text/data from a pdf

Question

I have just been given five large boxes of documents which are old work orders which include (in the same position on every page) a customer's name, address, tel etc.  I'm pretty adept at scanning stuff to pdf using Adobe Acrobat 9.0 Pro (version 9 5 1 283) but I don't know how (if it's even possible) to batch scan just that part of the page which contains the customer data and save it to Excel or csv or similar.  I know I could highlight the required text on each page and copy and paste it into Excel but is there a more elegant solution?  To create the pdf, I can scan using our office Epson all-in-one (although it's on the other side of the office) or a Neatdesk Scanner I'm trying out.  The latter scans the pages quickly but if I set the Neat software to treat the document as a contact card, it only picks up our company address from the top of the page and ignores everything else ;-)  I'm running Windows 7.

Answer 1

Hello
You may try the following AppleScript script. It will ask you to choose a root folder where to start searching for *.map files and then create a CSV file named "out.csv" on desktop which you may import to Excel.
set f to (choose folder with prompt "Choose the root folder to start searching")'s POSIX path
if f ends with "/" then set f to f's text 1 thru -2
do shell script "/usr/bin/perl -CSDA -w <<'EOF' - " & f's quoted form & " > ~/Desktop/out.csv
use strict;
use open IN => ':crlf';
chdir $ARGV[0] or die qq($!);
local $/ = qq(\\0);
my @ff = map {chomp; $_} qx(find . -type f -iname '*.map' -print0);
local $/ = qq(\\n);
#     CSV spec
#     - record separator is CRLF
#     - field separator is comma
#     - every field is quoted
#     - text encoding is UTF-8
local $\\ = qq(\\015\\012);    # CRLF
local $, = qq(,);            # COMMA
# print column header row
my @dd = ('column 1', 'column 2', 'column 3', 'column 4', 'column 5', 'column 6');
print map { s/\"/\"\"/og; qq(\").$_.qq(\"); } @dd;
# print data row per each file
while (@ff) {
    my $f = shift @ff;    # file path
    if ( ! open(IN, '<', $f) ) {
        warn qq(Failed to open $f: $!);
        next;
    $f =~ s%^.*/%%og;    # file name
    @dd = ('', $f, '', '', '', '');
    while (<IN>) {
        chomp;
        $dd[0] = \"$2/$1/$3\" if m%Link Time\\s+=\\s+([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{4})%o;
        ($dd[2] = $1) =~ s/ //g if m/([0-9 ]+)\\s+bytes of CODE\\s/o;
        ($dd[3] = $1) =~ s/ //g if m/([0-9 ]+)\\s+bytes of DATA\\s/o;
        ($dd[4] = $1) =~ s/ //g if m/([0-9 ]+)\\s+bytes of XDATA\\s/o;
        ($dd[5] = $1) =~ s/ //g if m/([0-9 ]+)\\s+bytes of FARCODE\\s/o;
        last unless grep { /^$/ } @dd;
    close IN;
    print map { s/\"/\"\"/og; qq(\").$_.qq(\"); } @dd;
EOF
Hope this may help,
H