Copy All Text from PDF to Windows Clipboard

Question

I'm working in VBA (MS Office 2010) and want to extract some key words from PDF attachments that I regularly receive in Outlook.

I planned to save the PDFs as a Word documents and extract the text from these but apparently I cannot do this programatically as I'm using Acrobat X Standard (seems I would need Pro).

So, am now looking for a way to copy all text from a PDF doc to the Windows clipboard using Acrobat Library methods. I will then paste into Word (this copy/paste works fine when done manually - no corruption of text).

I have very limited experience working with Acrobat and am reviewing the Acrobat SDK resources etc. but proving challenging.

How can I select all text in a PDF document and copy it to the Windows clipboard using Acrobat Library methods in VBA?

...or you can just upgrade. Acrobat XI Standard and DC Standard both allow for export to Office formats via VBA. — joelgeraci, Apr 20 '17 at 02:12

B.Cap · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-13T21:45:51.730

For reference, I resolved using the code below.

This quickly coverts a PDF file into a text file and from there key words can be selected and read into a string, put into the clipboard etc.

This is working with Adobe X Standard.

Code is from http://forum.chandoo.org/threads/vba-to-convert-pdf-to-txt.14245/

Dim AcroXApp As Acrobat.AcroApp
Dim AcroXAVDoc As Acrobat.AcroAVDoc
Dim AcroXPDDoc As Acrobat.AcroPDDoc
Dim Filename As String
Dim jsObj As Object
Dim NewFileName As String

Filename = "C:\Documents and Settings\xxx\Desktop\file01.pdf"
NewFileName = "U:\file.txt"

Set AcroXApp = CreateObject("AcroExch.App")
'AcroXApp.Show

Set AcroXAVDoc = CreateObject("AcroExch.AVDoc")
AcroXAVDoc.Open Filename, "Acrobat"
AcroXApp.Hide 'my additon - needed?

Set AcroXPDDoc = AcroXAVDoc.GetPDDoc

Set jsObj = AcroXPDDoc.GetJSObject

jsObj.SaveAs NewFileName, "com.adobe.acrobat.plain-text"

AcroXAVDoc.Close False
AcroXApp.Hide
AcroXApp.Exit

End Sub

Copy All Text from PDF to Windows Clipboard

1 Answers1