Accumulate Text Macro (v11.0.3)

[Airy]

OOPS- I meant to post this after another thread (below.) I'll just leave it here and edit the title and opening. Sorry. Or if a website admin wants to move this, that's fine with me. Here's the thread I meant to respond to:

Extract text from PDF, do some cleaning up and write to text file

Here is a macro that can be used for PDF files with columns with unintended overflow to other columns. If no other tool can get you a clean extract, you can use this macro to manually extract the content: Select a column (or text block). Press the keyboard shortcut. The extracted text will be written to a text file. Demo: [1] Result: [1] As you can see, some manual work is needed to add the missing part (first lines of second and third column). Extract text from PDF, do some cleaning u…

I hope you aren't upset if I post a macro with a different approach for solving this. When I've needed to do this, I've written a macro that intercepts CMD-C and accumulates the text being copied into a separate variable. Rather than create a second macro to "stop" the accumulation, I modified the macro so that if the number of characters being copied is under 3, that resets the accumulator. I liked that method of stopping, rather than creating a different macro. Using a variable instead of a file allows the user to easily restart if he makes a mistake.

Perhaps a second macro to "paste" the accumulated text (perhaps assigned to CTRL-CMD-V?) would compliment this macro.

Notice how my macro inserts a newline between copies. I find that this is the best solution, although it often requires manual fixing later on.

I think I used macro like this to copy an entire manual of a computer game into a Pages file. In my opinion, PDF should stand for "Plague/Disease File."

Accumulate Text Macro (v11.0.3)

Accumulate Text.kmmacros (3.4 KB)