Adobe Acrobat

I have Adobe Acrobat Pro on my computer at work. The post on the DOT Manual brought this to mind. If you have a PDF file that was printed to a PDF rather than scanned, you can save it as a word document, and get a very accurate document. This could save a lot of time with a project like the DOT manual.

I am working on building a control database. The are a lot of descriptions of monuments that were typed up back in the 60's and filed in ring binders. We have scanned some of them. I was cleaning up some monuments in the database and decided to give the PDF save as a try. On the first monument, I re typed the description. It was no fun. Then I did a save as with the PDF file and created a word document. Then I called up the next monument in the database and pasted the description in. Even though the scan was crooked, it did a very good job of converting it to text. I checked all the numbers and directions, took about 30 seconds to fix them, them looked at the entire description. They've were a few extra spaces such as " h Ouse" but. I attached a copy of the PDF to the database as an associated document. The next ones that I did, I included a note that the description was from a scan and to check the associated documents for the original PDF. Now all I have to do is add descriptions to the other 75,000 monuments that do not have them included. Until then, a hand held GPS and metal detector is a good way to recover them, if you don't have the paper description.