I often download data in .pdf files that must be converted to .csv or .ods formats for subsequent analysis. Does LibreOffice have a native function or existing utility (would this be called an extension?) that performs such a function? I am aware of and have used multiple online pdf → csv converters, the plethora of which attest to the need, so this function built into LibreOffice would be welcomed by many, I suspect.
Thank you.
Jim Martin
I personally rarely need to import tables from .pdf, and if I needed, I used a so-called OCR software (IRIS 14 in my case) → Writer → Calc. For different reasons I considered import from .pdf in another context. You may try what I produced. (See link at bottom.)
Concerning the presently available filters for Import/Export with LibreOffice see the attached spreadsheet document. It contains a few lines of Basic code (basically taken from Andrew Pitonyak’s “Useful Macro Informatiom” for the output of a complete list of I/E-filters. It also contains a Standard-filtered list of I/E-filters whose names contain “pdf”.
The first link below in turn contains a link to an extension offered by Oracle (when the now AOO still was OOo under the rule of that company). That link points to an outdated version. My second linke below points to the most recent version of that extension I know of.
See also:
https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?t=50304
PDF Import for Apache OpenOffice | Apache OpenOffice Extensions (I never tried it.)
Pdf to Draw to Writer (Adapt it to your needs.)
I have tried an external piece of software that works really well.
It is also free of charge ( MIT License ) so I hope this information could be usefull.
In Linux you might like to call it via:
java -Dfile.encoding=utf-8 -Xms256M -Xmx1024M -Dwarbler.port=9999 -Dtabula.openBrowser=true -jar ./tabula.jar;
I’ve tried Tabula, which is not bad (not great either in my opinion).
Personally I think PDF24 is much better.
With the online version you can directly convert to .ods.
With the PDF24 Creator desktop app you can convert to .xlsx
Both are 100% free.