Revenue Canada wants an English translation of an income report written in Italian. I have the file as a pdf 12 pages long thick with minute little boxes and headings. I have created a spreadsheet to imitate the layout of the original document, this was extremely time consuming to do, and every time I change the slightest little thing all my pagination needs to be redone. I am sure it was not the smartest way to proceed and it swallowed long days of tedious work. I just learned that Adobe Acrobat promises to convert pdf files to Excel spreadsheet. Once in a decent format, which is the time consuming part, I can either do the translation myself, not a big deal, or try feed it to Google translator for the bulk then fix it up myself. Except: I don’t have either Excel nor Adobe acrobat, though I am considering this, I am leery to spend megabucks on the latter especially, since I do not know that it will do as promised. In the past I did download an Acrobat tester and, try as I might, I could not make it work. I already have Libre Office… any words of wisdom for me on how to rationally get this done? Thank you!
Foxit reader has option to save a pdf as text, and you might then be able to read into LibreOffice spreadsheet as text.
Tesseract-OCR has the option to scan pdf to excel, but it might take quite some time to get it working. I played a little with this earlier this year but was more interested in scanning paper invoices and then OCR only on selected text areas. It might work better from an electronic source of pdf.