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Turning PDFs to Text. Update (1/18/2011): We originally wrote that we had promising results with the commercial product deskUNPDF's trial mode. We have since ordered the full version of deskUNPDF and tried using it on some of the latest payments data. Adobe’s Portable Document Format is a great format for digital documents when it’s important to maintain the layout of the original format. However, it’s a document format and not a data format. Unfortunately, it seems to be treated like a data transfer format, especially by some government agencies and others, who use it to release data that would be much more useful for journalists and researchers as a spreadsheet or even as a plain text file.

In our Dollars for Docs project, companies provided their data in PDF format. Wikipedia has a good list of PDF tools and converters. We recently tested the commercial product deskUNPDF on several of the latest payment lists. Note: The following guide is for PDFs that actually have embedded text in them. Easy enough. Free Online OCR. Zamzar. Online convert. Youconvertit.

Convert.Files.