Even though this is a good idea for some situations, most of the times, it’s just annoying: Collecting ideas for seminar papers or a thesis, for instance, is almost impossible without being able to Copy & Paste certain paragraphs from the PDF.

Fortunately, Linux can solve this problem with a simple tool called pdf to text. This command line tool simply strips all text from the PDF file and saves it to a given text-file.

Installation

The tool is part of the package poppler-utils and can be installed via your favorite package manager, e.g. apt-get:

$ apt-get install poppler-utils

Extract text from PDF files

This is also pretty simple and the man-page gives the instructions: pdftotext [options] <PDF> [<text-file>].

$ pdftotext PDF-file-with-copy-and-paste-restriction.pdf

In case you’d like to perform this for every PDF-file in a folder (recursive search), simple do that:

$ find -name '*.pdf' -exec pdftotext "{}" \;

After executing the command, there will be a *.txt-file for each PDF file in the folder, – containing the plain-text of the corresponding PDF file.

In some applications you might want to calculate a deadline date within the week, e.g. to make sure that a product or service will be delivered within a time frame of max. 10 working days.

The VB function

The following small function adds weekdays to a given start date and calculates a dealine date within the week (Mo – Fr):

Function AddWeekDays(StartDate As Long, Days As Long) As Date
    Dim i As Long
    Dim d As Date
 
    d = StartDate
    i = 0
 
    While i < Days
        d = DateSerial(Year(d), Month(d), Day(d) + 1)
        If Weekday(d, vbMonday) < 6 Then
            i = i + 1
        End If
    Wend
 
    AddWeekDays = d
End Function

Sample usage

The function above can either be used in a spreadsheet or within a VB script.

Usage in a spreadsheet

Here’s how you would add it to a spreadsheet, e.g. in Microsoft Excel or in OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet:

Usage in a VB script

Sub TestWeekDays()
    Dim SLA_Violation_Date As Date
    SLA_Violation_Date = AddWeekDays(DateValue("27.07.2008"), 10)    
 
    ' Result will be 27.07.2008 + 10 Working Days = 08.08.2008
    MsgBox SLA_Violation_Date
End Sub