Conversion from pdf to txt yields (near) empty file

[jchwenger]

Hi there,

I'm faced with a small problem: I am trying to convert a pdf to txt, and that pdf allows me to select and copy paste (it's not just images).

I first tried:

pdftotext source.pdf source.txt

That yielded a file with only ^L page breaks. Then I tried:

ebook-convert source.pdf source.txt

The result has the big titles in there, but literally nothing more.

Does anybody know if there are options I could try in this case, or is it likely hopeless (e.g. because of the complexity of the pdf) ?

Using ebook-convert (calibre 7.13.0).

Thanks a lot in advance!

[kovidgoyal]

If you can select, you can possibly select all and copy paste to get the text out.

[sgmoore]

If copy/paste does not work, then you could try OCR.

Mind you it didn't work for me when I tried it.

I had the same issue on a pdf of a really old public domain book and when I took a closer look at the pdf, I came to the conclusion that it was just a collection of photographs of the pages of a physical book. Some of the pages were not exactly straight and some were more faded than others.

Because I prefer using my kindle and because reading such pdf's on my kindle is such a pain, I tried a few things to get an epub text version including using OCR. But although the quality of the images was enough to make it easily readable as a pdf, it obviously was not good enough for OCR, so I basically gave up and read the pdf on my computer

[jchwenger]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

If you can select, you can possibly select all and copy paste to get the text out.

I tried, but somehow only the text of the current page gets copied (both in Calibre and in MacOS Preview). After selecting all, the current page content is selected, but other pages are somehow selected 'overall', unsure how to describe this, and the content is therefore not captured by the copying.