I use a program on my iPhone for tracking my 3d printer filament inventory and thus far, that program only has the capability of generating and emailing myself a pdf document that contains all of the selected data on my phone preformatted as labels. The information contained within the pdf is in a static (for now) format which contains the filament spool’s manufacturer, the material type, special material qualities, color, and time stamp which is all separated via a CR/LF all contained in a text box and then a QR code image which is generated by a random string of characters within the program. I can open the pdf within writer or draw no problems but if I try to select all / copy / paste the pdf info into calc, I don’t get the QR image crossing over at all, the text import dialog shows nothing for me, and when I do copy paste it gives me all the data in a single column separated by the CR/LF into individual rows. How can I make this go smoother? Surely there is a way. My ultimate goal is to use the spreadsheet as an intermediary data source (with the QRs) so that I can print out labels using my Brother QL thermal label printer (to which I CAN print to directly from within Libre or the Brother app) but tailor the overall layout to my liking. I’m pretty sure that I’m just simply missing some step at this point. [Edited per kind recommendation]
I wouldn’t say so. PDF is not designed to be a format for data exchange. In worst case you only get an image, but as you can paste text yours is not worst case.
.
If you ask for help, add an example pdf, so somebody can check.
.
And if I needed to approach this I’d try OCR-Software like Tessaract first to convert pdf to txt, then continue with python from there. (But actually the first thing I’d do is checking, if the printer can produce something more usable like a csv-file, or provides an API to extract data…)
.
PS: You should remove unrelated advertisements for apps from your post.
As far as the unintentional ‘advert’: I had only mentioned the program by name because I figured it might have been an easy way for someone to lookup and check out (they have a try me demo on their site) what I was working with
(/me wonders silently whether there’s something like pdf2text for iOS)
Hi,
have you heard about Tabula: https://tabula.technology/ (free and open source).
I used to use it some time ago and was satisfied with the result (YMMV).
Well, if I just wanted to keep everything on my phone I’d be fine. ………. 
SMDH. I was mentally composing my next sentence that was going to mention that I’ve got the full version of the FoxIt PDF program and then I realized that I hadn’t even tried to use foxit to edit it much less just open it… wow, just wow
That’s about like saying you can’t go grocery shopping because you don’t have a shopping cart nor a way to get a cart from your house to the store as you only have a car. Yup…