Hi Kevin,
Here are two typical examples:
http://www.biomedcentral.c
http://www.sciencemag.org/
where the latter is probably more difficult to process.
Jens
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Browse All TopicsDear Experts,
I am using an ebook reader to read scientific publications.
Unfortunately they usually have 2 columns which makes the text appear rather small.
How can I join the columns while the text stays in sequence.
The images are not important to me.
Is there a tool which allows to do this for many articles in batch mode?
Thansk,
Jens
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Hi Kevin,
Here are two typical examples:
http://www.biomedcentral.c
http://www.sciencemag.org/
where the latter is probably more difficult to process.
Jens
Jens,
How are you doing?
This is what I did:
- Opened up your document and used the select text tool in Acrobat (looks like an upper case i with an arrow next to it and the word select).
- I selected through the first 4 pages (2 to 5, since the first was an intro in the standard one column format).
- I then copied this text.
- Opened up word and pasted the text in
- Now you could delete anything you don't want (the numbers from the charts, etc).
- Finally, I "printed" to PDF from Word using Acrobat.
See the attached where I have the word paste and then then printed results. I am sure you could adjust the paper size in Word prior to printing it to PDF if you wanted the page to only be say 4 inches wide, or whatever the specifications are that your reader will accept.
Hope this helps,
Kevin
Jens,
The main issue is going to be that you have non-standard formatting from document to document. Lets say you had just the first page of each as an abstract all in one large column (one page wide) and then pages 2 to the end, were in the double columns. You could probably "print to pdf" pages 2 to the end. Then batch all of those left, because they would all be the same format, 2 columns throughout. However, these documents could jump from two back to one column, and so on, which means that they would probably not lend themselves well to a batch run (things would come out incorrectly).
I do not believe that there is a way to run the batch as you think using the pdf printer, however I am sure it could be created programmatically, however the large number of variables (as these documents each have unique formats) will make the programming a mess.
I would suggest asking a new question in the page layout areas, which includes programs like InDesign and QuarkExpress, which might be able to help in the batch aspect, however, since you don't really have a template from which the batch will run on, the results are probably going to be less than stellar and require A LOT of initial work. This work is probably going to be greater than it would be to do these by hand!
Regards,
Kevin
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by: redrumkevPosted on 2008-11-07 at 12:52:43ID: 22908380
allmer,
How are you doing?
Could you post perhaps 2 examples of what you are trying to do. I do not know the steps off the top of my head, but perhaps I could get a working solution for you if you posted something to work from.
Thank you,
Kevin