[texhax] search for text in a pdf file

[BRØCKâQUÂNTIFIER.ORG]

thanks, everyone, for your surprisingly helpful replies.

let's see if i can answer my own queestion.

I was advised that there are two sorts of .pdf files.  ones made up of
text and images, and ones made up of just images.  the text/image ones
should be easy to search through, while the image only ones will require a
converter of some sort (something stronger than ps2ascii, i've found).

next i installed acroread which seems to be just a nice little port of
adobe acrobat.  to get it i had to add



deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main

to my /etc/apt/sources.list

and poof, there it is.  thanks apt.  it comes iwth a find function right
on the little tool bar, but since my copy of my pdf seems to be of the
image only variety (I know its just a scan of a journal) i couldnt find
text.  sucks.

so now i'm back where i started, only just a bit smarter.  so what else do
y'all use to pull text out of a pdf such as this one?

thanks,


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On Fri, 6 Aug 2004, Philip TAYLOR wrote:

> Maybe use Adobe Acrobat ?  That has inbuilt search facilities.
> Philip Taylor
> --------
> BRØCKâQUÂNTIFIER.ORG wrote:
>  >
>  > hello smart folks.  i have a pdf file that is some 350 pages.  and i need
>  > to search for one phrase.  gv doesnt seem to have a search function, i've
>  > tried ps2ascii and pstotext after converting the pdf with pdf2ps.  the
>  > resulting txt files just have a bunch of ^L over and over.  I'm stumped.
>  > how do i search for a phrase in a pdf file?
>  >
>  > thanks for any help from a forum that's not really about pdf.
>  >
>  > bobby
>
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