Redwing

[Mark Huston]

We're receiving more and more information in .PDF format, and I need to extract data from these documents. Adobe Acrobat's "Table Tool" is terrible. I'm interested in Redwing, but I have two questions. First, Redwing isn't listed in the "Buy on-line" section of Datawatch.com. How much is it for Monarch Pro 6.0 users? Second, I see that Redwing is "Not compatible with Adobe Acrobat 5.0." What's up with that?

[skinman]

Mark -

Please read this post:

redwing (http://mails.datawatch.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=000244)

[ May 19, 2006, 12:25 PM: Message edited by: Todd Niemi ]

[Mark Huston]

I understand that Datawatch has no plans to upgrade Redwing to Acrobat 5. It appears that at $300 there isn't much demand for it. That may explain why it's not available for purchase from the Datawatch site. Redwing also has been discontinued from Amazon.com.

I downloaded PDF2TXT from http://www.verypdf.com and it does convert my PDFs adequately. Single-use license is $38. I then can open and manipulate the TXT files in Monarch. I'll start pounding on our vendor to start making data available in a flat-table CSV format or something besides PDF. I'll also look into upgrading to Acrobat 6.0.

Mark!

[Dan Kinney]

There is another product that I recently purchased and it does a great job. It is called PDFCONVERTER and the vendor is SCANSOFT ($50.00).

Scansoft PDFConverter (http://www.scansoft.com/pdfconverter/)

It converts a PDF to a WORD document and it maintains all the graphics and formating. Hope this helps.

[skinman]

Dan - Are using this converter to get editable Word documents or do you use it to create a document that is usable in Monarch? The latter is my goal.

[Grant Perkins]

skinman,

I don't know the latest products but some old Omnipage stuff seems to work OK (and I have a Copy Of Dragon Dictate which is reasonable for its time. But it is a few years old as it was a Dragon days product before it ended up with L&H and then got sold to Scansoft!)

I happened to be looking at the Scansoft web site w/r a possible purchase of the latest Voice Recognition stuff and noticed the PDF Converter. Also Omnipage12 which looks like it offers the same functions in a full scanning/OCR for the office based system with batch processing.

PDF conversion to Office products - Word (could then 'save' the doc as a text file I guess?) or Excel - so maybe some possiblity to convert the bits that are of interest into Excel then read excel into Monarch (Pro) as a database?

I really don't know, just trying to put forward some ideas that might work for you and which you could confirm (or not!) with Scansoft.

Whatever, I would be interested to know what happens in the end.

Grant



Originally posted by skinman:
Dan - Are using this converter to get editable Word documents or do you use it to create a document that is usable in Monarch? The latter is my goal.

[Dan Kinney]

Skinman,

Both actually. With it as a Word document I can get at the data to do anything I want with it.

From Word I can save it as a TXT file and use it in Monarch.

I had purchased a copy for myself and we just purchased 10 copies for the Company I work for. There is a lot of valuable data in PDF format, but few ways to get at it.

I just converted a 330 page PDF document to Word last night and it came out looking like the original PDF. It took about a 1/2 hour to do it, but it does a fantastic job.