PDF Import

[jbvinny]

I am brand new Monarch user (I've had the software for two days). I am having a problem opening a report that is a PDF file. The PDF is generated by Win2PDF. Any ideas? The Report Window is blank. No data at all.

I appreciate any help.

[Grant Perkins]

Hi and welcome to the forum.

I would guess that your PDF file has only an IMAGE (Graphic) and no text.

You could check this with the Adobe Acrobat Reader to try to convert it to a text file. If I am right that too will give you a blank file.

PDFs can have text only, graphics only or a mixture. Monarch can only work with the text.

To get text out of the graphics content you would need to look at running the PDF through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program to extract it to text first.

To prevent overload I will stop at this point and let you ascertain what you have in the PDF. If you need to consider OCR activity there are people here on the forum who have direct and recent experience and may be able to help.


HTH.



Grant

[jbvinny]

You are correct. After making the previous post I did some research. The WIN2PDF program only writes documents as scanned images. So it looks like I will have to find a work around or do things the old fashion way.

[Data Kruncher]

There are quite a number of PDF writing utilites, many of which are available for free. I've had good success with CutePDF. Monarch can read its output very well.

[OllyInMunich]

Hi jbvinny,

If you've access to the source application and can choose another PDF writer, then CutePDF or others might be the solution.

However, if you only have image based PDFs to work from, then you'll need to convert these to text-based PDFs. I've had very good results with PDF Transformer from Abbyy. Do bear in mind that no conversion will give you 100% accuracy, but unless you've got really horrible data, you should be OK.

Sometimes you might need to convert lower case "l" to numeric "1" and the like, but this is easy enough using calculated fields.

Best wishes,

Olly

[jbvinny]

I have discovered a convert to searchable PDF option on our scanner. After completing this process I am able to search the original pdf document. Because of which I am assuming the conversion has worked. However, the import to Monarch still results in a blank screen. Any ideas?

[Grant Perkins]

My guess is that the process produces an OCR like 'words contained' file that it associates with the image but no attempt at a full, formatted, conversion to text.

Sadly, if I am right, that means that you are no further forward with using Monarch on you PDF files.


Grant