Converting those pesky PDFs to TXTs
It really irritates me when I ask public agencies for Excel or tab-delimited files, and I’m greeted with a PDF in my e-mail inbox. Alas, if the coding is right, that issue can be fixed using PDF2TXT (if you have a PC). This basically allows you to strip out the plain text, with the appropriate tabs (if it’s a spreadsheet) to then copy into Excel. Mac users, you may have another option. You can open the PDF inside Preview, a lightweight alternative to Adobe Acrobat. Then, you copy the contents into TextEdit, and save that as a text file to open inside Excel. There’s also Adobe’s free service, pdf2txt@adobe.com. Simply e-mail a PDF attachment to that address, and you’ll get back a text file in return.
