PDF Expert, PDF to Text, Drafts & Workflow

What a cracking combination!

Here is the situation. I made a multi page PDF form for data collection about the trips on our shared narrow boat [^1]. This will be passed onto the other owners by email and also pasted into a page on the website. This information needs to be displayed in a simple but effective way, and because not all the owners run specialised PDF software, the best option is plain text. I have automatically embellished the report by the simple matter of adding some markdown formatting symbols ie bold to the PDF form.
This works well in our Word Press site and is easy to read in vanilla text in emails.
There are a couple of other formatting issues — I need to remove a header word, and to colour the “Date of Trip” field in a nice green for the website. This is done by a bit of added html. Unfortunately, this does not help with legibility of the message —

Date of trip:
31/10/2015 — 07/11/2015

It does work though with Markdown preview but not in email. It does work as I wish on the website — so I will keep this.

The problem arises in that is is difficult to extract text from a PDF form, and when you manage this, each page is handled on its own [^2]. The PDF form also needs to be saved as a flattened copy, otherwise nothing appears on the screen.
I used to do this with Good Reader, but each page needed to be extracted, copied and pasted to a document in turn.

PDF to Text app to the rescue [^3].

My workflow is now to populate the PDF form using PDF Expert[^4]
Then using ‘open in’ (flattened copy) copy it to PDF to Text. I can convert to txt with this and then use ‘copy to Drafts’.
The text is then displayed in the fantastic Drafts [^5] app[^7]

I can now adjust the text, delete words etc using a Workflow that is patched together from examples on the Workflow[^6] website. It takes the text, chews them up and spits them back into Drafts. Then one click on a workflow within the program — Command C and my text is copied to my Mac. One further click to paste into email or onto the website. Job done.

[^1]:Oasis Too

[^2]:this really relates to iOS — many desktop PDF programs can extract text, but this is not true in iOS

[^3]:PDF to Text by PDF2Office – the PDF Converter by Recosoft
https://appsto.re/gb/K06CU.i

[^4]:PDF Expert 5 – Fill forms, annotate PDFs, sign documents by Readdle
https://appsto.re/gb/nGcwS.i

[^5]:Drafts 4 – Quickly Capture Notes, Share Anywhere! by Agile Tortoise
https://appsto.re/gb/BTL91.i

[^6]:Workflow: Powerful Automation Made Simple by DeskConnect, Inc.
https://appsto.re/gb/2IzJ2.i

[^7]:buy this at once — it is a no brainer decision

Why chirurgean?
It means “hand work” and acknowledges the fact that surgeons are skilled with their hands. Part of the arms of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh includes the “seeing hand” — a hand with an eye in the palm — useful when the hand is inside a body cavity with no direct line of sight to the area of interest.

The quote below presses all my buttons

Acta Parliamentorum Caroli II A.D. 1670

Our Sovereign Lord & Estates of Parliament vnderftanding that the Airt of Chirurgearie is ane ancient worthy & free Airt moft neceffar for the healths & Lyves of His Mãties subjects And that the incorporation of the Chirurgeans & Barbars of Ed^ are ane able & famous incorporation whereby the Leidges have found large experience of ther abilities in peace & warr to ther great advantage…….

They being as Nurferies in thefe Airts to this our Soveraign Lords ancient Kingdom & for preventing the dangerous practice of ignorant and vnfkillfull people that afsumes the practifes of thefe Airts to the Lofe of the Lyves of His Mãties good Subjects which have bein too frequent …….

I was looking forward to these in ios9 — some sites are not useable because of awful ads. As I scroll down the page, more ads load at the top and I retreat up the page. Vertigo inducing and unpleasant.
So what should I use?
1Blocker which has good reviews was not on the UK App Store. Crystal seemed good and surprise, was free for the first comers. It just works!
Shortly after, I noticed Peace from Marco Arment. I like him and his apps. The cost of £2.29 was well worth it. It did prove to be rather vigorous so that TheTimes.co.uk did not load, but I was able to whitelist this site and ads here are ok.
Then Marco gets cold feet and pulls the app. I did get a refund — the first time ever. So,the app was purged.
Today, & 79p later I also have Blockr. More stuff I can fine tune on this app than Crystal. It too is sometimes too blunt, but these are the opening shots in a new war and there is time for finesse to develop

The dreaded OVLD reared its head again today on the model railway. What had I done wrong? I checked the connections, reversed the wiring to the Cobalt point motors ¹ but to no avail. Back to basics and I found the reel of solder wire was lying across the tracks. Problem solved.
On to Point no 15 … this time, everything I did led to the OVLD sign. Reasoning that human error is the usual source of the problem, I found that I had used a non insulating rail joiner on the live frog. Basic error. Even worse, I had used my last irj. Oh well, off to the model shop in the am and continue to be thankful for a local model railway shop; not all people are so blessed.

The Thin Man

As so often, The incomparable ¹ has come up trumps again


The first film is a hoot — perhaps more for the social observations ²


How can stacking up 5 martinis to catch up equate with the 1 glass of red limit that was plucked from the air by Dick Smith and colleagues from the BMJ ³

Well I took the plunge for real yesterday. Aperture on the Mac has had its day, and when I returned from Dehli, I bought Lightroom5 for future cataloguing of my photos, but thought I would view my old photos using the Aperture app. Best laid plans .. I do like to have all of my 48k+ photos in one app — the catalogues should contain all my photos of family and locations. So I have imported all my photos into the Lightroom database. The original photos stay where they are and the metadata already matched is unchanged. What has altered is that the Raw and JPEG files are viewed as originally shot. No enhancements or fancy crops. I will have to start from the beginning. Lightroom like Aperture is a lossless photo editor — this will enable me to look again at my photos and to apply my experience to their enhancement, without permanently altering them. Unlike most things in life, I will have another chance to change. Bigger questions still remain — DAM — digital asset management [1] Backup, backup, backup — this vital subject is also covered by this book. What format should I use? Should I have a mix of different camera RAW formats, or go with the Adobe DNG ‘standard’? I have decided to go DNG for future storage of RAW files, but will keep for the moment my old RAW, JPEG and PNG files. Whatever you do, don’t JPEG your .jpg files. You will just lose more information from your ‘lossy’ files — and you can never get this back. So far, PDF A and DNG seem to be the way to go

The project moves on. I have completed the bones of the ramp to the coaling shed and the roadway is next to be glued. Photos to follow when in situ. The Metcalfe buildings look good when photographed with grunge filters. City of Edinburgh captured against industrial buildings is a good example.

Further work today to complete the ramp and continue work on installing turnouts on the station side of the layout