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General Category => General Chaos => : dragonshaos April 19, 2009, 03:01:33 AM

: Getting info from a PDF
: dragonshaos April 19, 2009, 03:01:33 AM
I am not the greatest person when it comes to computers.  I know more than the average person, which could be saying a lot, but I have a little problem.

Very simple, I want to take some info from the PDF of Dungeon magazine from the WotC website, Dragon magazine 364, the section on Kobolds.  All I want to know is how I can take the monster card, in it's format, and copy it onto something like a word document.  I also have the PDF downloaded if it makes a difference.  I know a website where I can manually input the info and it makes a monster card but that is too time costly.
: Re: Getting info from a PDF
: Tadanori Oyama April 19, 2009, 03:54:45 AM
So, what do you want to do? I mean, you have a PDF, you can just print the page. Or select the text, paste it into a word document, and print that.
: Re: Getting info from a PDF
: dragonshaos April 19, 2009, 11:48:59 AM
Ah, When I copy it it gets the text but not the format.  I would print it but I've been printing alot of things lately and don't want to waste the ink.  So, here's the problem.  There's a PDF, it has a monster in it, i the Monster card format like in MM.  I can only copy the text from it, so when i paste it it looks messy and out of order.  I want to be able to print that section and as I'm typing this i just remembered I can use a tool in the PDF to copy sections instead of text and paste the section in a document.  I feel dumb now.  Thanks!
: Re: Getting info from a PDF
: Mason April 19, 2009, 12:07:58 PM
If it means that much to you then use windows excel for that. this way you can keep all that stuff looking the same as in the website. I haope you know how to use Excel because unfortunatly I have neither the time nor the patience to teach you to use excel over the computer. but Tadanori Oyama is right. just print the bitch.
: Re: Getting info from a PDF
: clockworkjoe April 19, 2009, 01:58:27 PM
Actually, I found a much easier way to do this. Get Foxit Reader and open the PDF in Foxit. There's a tool called Snapshot. Use it to highlight the monster state block. The snapshot tool will then create a bitmap of the highlighted section and put it in the clipboard. You can then paste the bitmap into Word.
: Re: Getting info from a PDF
: Tadanori Oyama April 19, 2009, 02:59:10 PM
When I need to make a block of monster stats I copy them out of a PDF into a WordDoc. It's a little off balance but still readable when you place it into colume format.