extracting data from PDF file into SAS

[eguva]

Is there a way to read PDF files into SAS.
I saw a presentation online, which says about ghost script, but i am not sure what it emans and how to do it.
Can someone help me if you have idea of how to read a PDF file into SAS.

Thanks,
Eguva

 

[ChrisW75]

Oooh, sounds interesting. I don't suppose you have a link to the presentation do you? I've never seen this done, so I can't help right away, but the idea sounds good, and I'd be keen to learn more myself.

Chris
Business Analyst, Code Monkey, Data Wrangler.
SAS Guru.

 

[klaz2002]

You would have to 'read' the text from a PDF file into a SAS dataset. You would then have to parse the dataset to get any data you want. You could use a tool called PDF2TXT (

http://www.verypdf.com/pdf2txt/pdf2txt.htm)

I am not sure if they have a command line version, but this should work. This tool seems to use the iText pdf library (Java or .Net) to extract the text from a pdf file. I think that its more work to do it this way as you would have to have a massive program to parse the incoming data. The reason is that with text in a pdf spaces are not really spaces but positions on the paper (layout). So what you think is a space (column) may actually be only one whitespace away from what you believe to be the previous column. But hey, if you figure something out let me know.
Klaz

 

[eguva]

Thank you for the link.
I was planning to write a generic SAS macro which can compare 2 pdf files and probably produce an output dataset for the user to subset or post-process it to reduce the output size. But looks like there is nothing in SAS to read a PDF file. Even if i use this tool, not every user can use my macro unless he/she has this tool.

Thanks.