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Yeah sure. File attached.

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I’m digitizing and coding an old board game. For love not money My version will have different bells and whistles than other versions.

Anyway, it was card based. The attached file shows the front face of 7 cards on 2 pages. On the first page they are turned one way, and on the second page I turned the original upside down.

I’d need to hand type about 30 files like this. Not impossible or expensive, but why not try the digital route, right?

I borrowed a fairly mint copy of a 35 year old game, made scans, saved to PDF, and returned the original. So this is what I’ve got.

My end goal is just to get the text out in a reasonably organized format that I could slice and dice using regular expressions.

Now that you have a separate image for each column

I don’t have this at all. I seem to have a bunch of arranged text boxes. It’s not clear at all that I have columns in anything but appearance.

OK. So this does … something.

What I get is a Word document in which the line up is better.

But now each block of text appears to be its own little image, with dozens of them on the page now. I believe these are all text boxes.

So now there is a new problem: how do I export the contents of all text boxes from a Word document? Just doing a save as (to TXT) gets me a blank file.

Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader?

Acrobat XI. I wrote that in the second line of the thread.

Acrobat can do the OCR and usually does a pretty good job.

I am not clear whether the OCR is done in Acrobat before the export, or if an image is sent to Word that then does the OCR.

Whichever program does the OCR, it does a fine job on the columns that are right-side up. But it does a terrible job on the columns that are upside-down (go figure And that terrible job goofs up Word’s ability to export any of the content to TXT reasonably by mixing up the paragraphs.

I would scan it all one way and then scan it all the other.

OK. I did that.

Then with the two scan results in Word delete the ‘upside down’ columns and paste the remainder back together.

I am noting that you said to do this after I am in Word, not in Adobe.

So it’s not clear to me how I should delete the problem columns. This is an image when it’s in Adobe, but by the time I get to Word it is in characters organized into paragraphs.

The thing is, I do not know how Word had ordered those paragraphs (or even how do find paragraph numbers).

They are not organized this way:

1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8

Nor are they organized this way:

1 3 5 7
2 4 6 8

They are all mixed up, something like this:

1 4 2 7
3 6 5 8

So even if I highlighted and used the arrows keys to progress through the paragraphs, I end up with a very choppy selection.

Thanks for the recommendations.

My need (currently) is really just for a fixed width font for one particular use, in an environment where I have to run portable.

FreeCommander XE fits the bill. Thanks!

There is a level of ridiculousness associated with this job that is coming from the people I report to.

I could probably do it in Acrobat, but I think they’d just come back and say “Fine … now could you put it into Word”. So I’d only be interested in this option if it made the import into Word work better.

As to the linked content, I don’t really need that. Just the links will be fine.

My deliverable needs to be just the posts and comments, suitable for being included into a master document. The actual file with links working as best as possible will probably never get looked at. They may just take the hard copy and slip it into binders to stick on a shelf.

Like I said, it’s kind of ridiculous for a blog with thousands of posts and comments, but there it is.

I am only worried about solving this particular problem because the stuff that gets dropped by Word is actually rather close to the front, and someone paging through from the front might see it.

Calimanco: That’s a good idea. I wonder if I create a brand new Google account that’s never been linked to my office network whether it will work.

Anak: another good idea.

I will check both of these out, and get back to the thread later on.

Again, I think I’m good to go. Thanks folks.

Oh yeah … much slicker. I spread mine out so people could see the steps.

Yes.

Thanks for helping me over the hump. I think the attached file does what I want. I use a lot more “helper” columns. It’s cumbersome, but I think it does the trick of keeping everything out in the open.

Paul T: That’s a great answer. I’m still open to suggestions. I just don’t feel qualified enough to assert on my own that this can’t be done.

Maudibe: (I’m assuming you mean User Defined Function). I think that would run into the same trouble. People kind’of draw these lines that they won’t cross: I don’t make them up, I just figure out how to roll with them.

I’m content to end the thread if you guys have no other suggestions.

Now I’m sad Maudibe …

Your VBA worked just fine for me after post # 4.

That’s why I said I have a slightly different question in post # 5.

I am trying to figure out how to do what your VBA code does … without the looping code and the data structures.

I know that sounds dumb. But I get questions like this a lot (since I’m what passes for an expert around where I work), and solutions that use VBA intimidate most people. So I show them how to do things with functions and formulas in cells.

So my approach to solving this problem for a user (before coming to the lounge) was not to use VBA. I think your solution is great if it’s just for me. But if I have to pass that off to a novice, I’ll bet you that they roll their eyes and go back to doing it by hand.

In doing this by hand, I had no trouble getting from column A to column C with just functions and formulas in cells. I can even identify the ends of the strings in C6, C10, C13, and C18.

I only had trouble on what would then be the next step: once I’ve isolated those 4 cells I want, how do I get Excel (using nothing but formulas and functions in B3.B6) to show them in B3.B6 without blank rows.

Yes, that works now. Thanks. It’s not that general, but I was able to figure out which parts to change if my data is organized differently.

I have a related question that I think can stay in this thread.

Honestly, if I have to do looping with even simple data structures like this … I don’t use Excel.

So, what I wonder is, if I want to stay in the spreadsheet and use just functions and formulas, is there a way to condense the column after concatenating the strings.

For example, it is easy to start with this in the A column:

a
b

c
d
e

And to do some “cumulative concatenation” in the B column to get:

a a
b ab

c c
d cd
e cde

But how would I go down column B and take each string that’s before the space and collect them in column C with no spaces, so that it looks like this:

a a ab
b ab cde

c c
d cd
e cde