ODBC Driver for Acrobat PDF file?

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I’ve got a potential customer who apparently has created interactive PDF files to gather information, and he would like to gather that information into a database. He said he’s heard of an ODBC driver for Acrobat PDFs. However, I have been unable to find out anything about this driver (like does it exist?). Even the Adobe site is less than helpful, you pretty much have to have a registered product to get any help.

Has anyone heard of this before?

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I’ve never heard of one before, but doing a search turns up something that appears misleading and might have encouraged him. Take a look at Acrobat Odbc Software download. I think the bottom line is that ODBC expects a set of data that is structured in some way, and can accomodate requests for selected data. PDF files by their nature are more like Word documents than databases, and there isn’t any sort of definition of how the data is structured. If his PDF files are really nicely formed, maybe the PDF Splitter that showed up at the top could be used to create a structued set of data, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

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This post describes how to use a PDF form to populate a database.

cheers, Paul

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Wendell, I’ve pretty much concluded the same thing, the potential client misunderstood what he had heard/read. The interaction between the PDF file and Access has to take place from the PDF side.

Paul, thanks for the link.

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