Category: accessible Devices
Hi everyone, was browsing the acb radio archives and the recent mainstream program featured a man who created pdf conversion software. Where can I find it, does it really work, and finally, will it fry my braille note. I'm beginning to hate hw for their proprietary snobbery.Help plese? Tiffany
don't really know about the software on main stream. Check out
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html
and see if that might help you. On that page there is an email address that you can send a file to adobe and have it converted to either .txt or .html.
Hope that helps.
Bob
There is a program called text pal. It is a handy little program that acts as microsoft word does. However it's most exciting feature is what it adds to the applacations menu. Once you've downloaded a PDF document if you go to it in windows explorer and right click on it you can send it to text pal which will convert it into a word document which you can save or read. You can save it as a TXT or DOC. Try googleing it cause I can't remember the link. I learned of the program from The parker accessible programs email list. Happy hunting. If you want I can try and see if I still have the email. Hit me up with a message in my inbox where I can FWD you the email if I find it.
There is an option in Acrobat which allows you to save as text or as an alternative format isn't there? I know on occasions due to the security level in the file you can't do that, but i think in most cases you can. the other alternative which is easy, is to just open the pdf, having acrobat set to full document instead of individual pages, and then silect all, coppy and paste into word.
there's also a little command line tool called pdftohtml. It can be found on source forge.
Hi again, the adobe email bounced back and i'm not sure if I can use any of these workarounds with the braillenote. I'll have to do some more searching I guess. On a different note, what's the command to copy a link in to the address bar on the mpower? I've never had any luck using the clipboard feature, infact think it's pretty useless. I need a laptop. Thanks for the suggestions. Tiffany
Unfortunately, the braille note can not handle PDF and the software mentioned here is Windows based and thus will not run on the BrailleNote. The email converter you mentioned here is no longer operational. You are going to need to convert the PDF to either word or txt on a windows based machine prior to sending it to the brailleNote.
Sorry about the email address not working. The Trace Research Foundation used to provide this service. I'll see if I can find the
Bob email address for them and check it out before I post it.
Okay, I couldn't find anything on the trace research center, does anyone know if they've gone out of business?
I did, however, try out the conversion email process mentioned on the adobe site and it worked fine.
What you do is send an email to pdf2txt@adobe.com with the pdf file you want converted attached. In a few seconds or minutes, you'll get an automated email back with the txt version attached to their email.
I sent them a two hundred page pdf file and it took about thirty seconds to get it back. I think that's pretty powerful.
You can also send the file to pdf2html@adobe.com and they say you will get an html file back. I didn't try it.
You should be able to accomplish this with the braillenote. I don't know about downloading the pdf file though.
Good luck.
Bob
Hi Bob, that's exactly what I did. I attached the downloaded pdf to the email and about an hour later the email came back as undeliverable. I'll try again. Glad it worked for you. I've had luck in the past sending pdf files as attachments but noone has been able to convert them the way everyone has mensioned here. Persistence is the key here I guess. Tiffany
Hi Tiffany.
If this is a one time thing, you could email me the document in question and I could convert it to text for you. Otherwise, if you think you might use this option often try the email approach I suggested earlier again. It should work for you.
Bob
Ok, now the braillenote is saying there's not enough space on the disk. I've sent pdf documents via email before so I don't know what could be causing the problem. I'm hoping to translate things from the antique pattern library so would like to make the email approach a working option. I've cleared all drives of the extra files I don't need and can't think what's causing the problem. grrr!
PDF Transformer and PDF Magic are also good.
Shanda
Some good ideas here, I'll be trying some of them out.
I've always used the save as text feature in adobe acrobat reader, but if your document is in columns, formatted in a certain way or has too much security attached, that doesn't work! Maybe the email conversion service wil, I'll send an example file out and see if it does!