Re: OT: Adobe .pdf grafix

> I know, the appropriate NG would be one of the computational ones, > but I thought I'd try the shortcut (i.e., asking youse guys...)

When you get the real answer, come back and tell us!

Is there any way to extract the actual vectors from a .pdf file?

It seems to me writing or printing to a postcript file should work. I just tried this with one of my Acrobat files, created from a Word document into which I had pasted two vector files from my spice program, a schematic and some data plots.

I opened the file in Acrobat and did a Save As, specifying a PostScript File (*.ps), and then I opened that file with a text editor, and there were the ASCII PostScript commands, including all the vectors with location info. You'd have to learn some PostScript to manually parse the commands, and extract the information. The .ps file was 4400 lines long. :-) Hmm, I'll bet there are plenty of free programs that'll do that task for you. Let us know what you find out.

I think you can also print from Acrobat reader to a PostScript printer, but clicking "print to file" in the dialog to get an ASCII .ps file.

Reply to
Winfield Hill
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[snip]

Provided the PDF isn't locked.

...Jim Thompson

Reply to
Jim Thompson

Pstoedit (needs ghostscript installed) will extract vectors from .pdf no problem, and write as .dxf, .xfig, .hpgl, etc. *provided* that the .pdf was produced from a vector original. If it started life as raster, say from a scan, you're screwed, unless you want to try extracting as a raster format and using autotrace. YMMV

All free/open-source.

formatting link
is a good place to start looking.

Reply to
Fred Abse

Dear Winfield Hill:

I believe that AutoCAD will also import a postscript file, without additional programs. Now whether it does it as something that looks like a drawing...

David A. Smith

Reply to
N:dlzc D:aol T:com (dlzc)

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