Category Archives: Easy PDF Explorer

Using the bookmarks bar in Easy PDF Explorer

The Bookmarks bar in Easy PDF Explorer appears below the main menu in Easy PDF Explorer.

Using the Bookmarks bar

The bookmarks lets you quickly open a folder or file by clicking on the item on the Bookmarks bar.  To place an item, drag and drop the folder or file from the Explorer window to the Bookmarks bar.

For example, this is the visual representation when you drag a folder over the Bookmarks bar.

When you drop the item on the Bookmarks bar, a button is created to represent the folder.

When you now click on that button, the active Explorer window will open to that folder.

Similarly, when you drag a file item on to the Bookmarks bar, a button is created for that file.  In the image below, we have 2 file items – a PDF file and an Excel workbook.

When you click on the file name on the Bookmarks bar, the active Explorer window will open to the folder containing that file, and highlight the file name.

Opening the context menu for items on the Bookmarks bar

You can open the context menu associated with the folder or file item by right-double-clicking on the button in the Bookmarks bar.  The image below shows the context menu when we click on our Excel file item.

Rearranging items on the Bookmarks bar

Right click on the folder or file item, then drag and drop the item on its new position.

Removing items from the Bookmarks bar

Right click on the folder or file item and drag it away from the Bookmarks bar.

 

Searching PDF annotations

In Easy PDF Explorer 3, we added the option to also search annotations in addition to page content.  To search annotations, select the annotations option in the Find Text window.

In the search results, the number of times the word/phrase appears on a page is displayed e.g.

In the first PDF file, the word aperture was found on pages 5, 7, 9.  On page 5, the word was found 3 times on the page, and twice in annotations.  On pages 7 and 9, the word was found twice in annotations in those pages.

Download a 14-day trial of Easy PDF Explorer now and start experiencing an easier way to work with your PDF files.

Mouse and keyboard interactions in Easy PDF Explorer 3

In Easy PDF Explorer 3, you can now perform more actions on your search results using the mouse and keyboard.

Selecting text

To select text on your PDF page, click and drag the mouse over the text you want to select.  The text will be highlighted and automatically copied to the clipboard.  You do not need to press CONTROL-C.

To select a single word, double click on the word.

Zooming

Pressing the CONTROL key and scrolling the mouse wheel zooms in and out of the current page.  The zoom factor is determined by the currently selected item in the zoom options on the toolbar.

Panning

In addition to using the horizontal and vertical scrollbars to pan around the page, you can use the mouse wheel to scroll the vertical scrollbar, and SHIFT + mouse wheel to scroll the horizontal scrollbar.

Navigating the search results and pages

Say we have the above search results, and Easy PDF Explorer is displaying page 5.

Pressing the a key will open page 3, which is the previous page in the search result.

Pressing the z key will open page 7, which is the next page in the search result.

Pressing the A key will open page 4, which is the previous page in the file.

Pressing the Z key will open page 6, which is the next page in the file.

Note that the A and Z shortcuts only work when the CAPS LOCK key is active.  They will not work if used with the SHIFT key.

With the above mouse and keyboard interactions, you can now navigate and select text on your PDF pages with minimal mouse movements.

Download a 14-day trial of Easy PDF Explorer now and start experiencing an easier way to work with your PDF files.

Finding PDF files that do not contain any text

The situation is as follows: you use Easy PDF Search to index and search for words and phrases in your PDF files.  Suddenly, you realise that not all your files have been indexed because they actually do not contain any searchable text.

This can happen if your PDF files are actually scans of documents, and you use an OCR application to read and store the text inside the PDF.  Now you need a quick and easy way to identify those PDF files that have not been scanned.

You can easily do this in Easy PDF Explorer.  First, select the Count images and text option.

If you want an accurate count of the number of images and text, you can leave the option at in all pages.  If you just want to know if a file contains any characters, then selecting the but stop when text is found option will speed up the process significantly.

This is because Easy PDF Explorer no longer has to scan every page in the PDF file – the moment it encounters a page that contains text, it stops scanning.  If your aim is just to know which files don’t contain any text, then this option is the fastest.

Once you’ve selected those options, select the PDF files you want to scan in the explorer window.

Easy PDF Explorer then lists down the files together with the number of characters in each file.

Click on the Characters column, and you can quickly sort the files by number of characters found.

Say you want to copy those files with no text to another folder.  Right click and select the Deselect all item.

Now click on the first file with no text, and while holding down the SHIFT key, click on the last file with no text.  The range of files will be highlighted.

Now right click to bring up the context menu, and click on the Select item.  The range of files will then be selected.

Now just click on the Copy to folder button, select the folder to copy the selected files to, and you’re done.  Now all you have to do is run your OCR application on those files to create a searchable PDF file.

Download a 14-day trial of Easy PDF Explorer now to work with your PDF files faster.

Easy PDF Search

Easy PDF Search is our advanced PDF indexing and search tool.  Read how Roberto Mantovani, Assistant Professor at the University of Urbino (Italy), uses Easy PDF Search to help him search his collection of over 12000 PDF files totalling over 320 GB in size.

High DPI support

We recently added high DPI support to some of our applications so that they render better when user displays are scaled to 125% or more.  We may have missed 1 or 2 items, so if you encounter any GUI elements that are oversized or undersized, we would appreciate it very much if you could let us know at support@yohz.com.

The applications we’ve added high DPI support for are:

Extracting pages from PDF files to individual files using Easy PDF Explorer

In Easy PDF Explorer 2.5, we added the option to extract the pages from PDF files into individual files.

Select the file(s) you want to extract the pages from, and click on the Extract pages button.

The default option is to create a single PDF file containing the pages you want to extract.  For e.g. if we entered <FIRST:5>, <LAST:10> as the pages to extract:

Easy PDF Explorer will create a single file containing the first 5 pages and last 10 pages for each of our selected files.

To extract each page into an individual file, we select the Store each page in a separate file option.  The suffix value will append the page number to the end of our file name.

Now when we run the task, each page is extracted to a separate file, using the combined naming convention of the file name and suffix.

Let’s say we want to extract each file into a separate folder, and each folder contains the individual pages.  To do that, enter the following values for the folder, file name, and suffix name.

Using the above values:

  • each file will be extracted into its own folder using the file name (without the extension)
  • the base file name will simply be .pdf
  • and the suffix (page_<PAGENUM:0000>) will be appended to the base file name.

Running the task results in the following folders:

and in each folder, each page is exported to its individual file.

Each folder contains the files for the first 5 pages and last 10 pages of each selected PDF file.

If you want to extract all the pages instead of a range of pages, leave the Pages to extract value empty.

Download a 14-day trial of Easy PDF Explorer now and start extracting your PDF pages immediately.

Extracting content to a folder named after the source PDF file in Easy PDF Explorer

Easy PDF Explorer helps you extract text and images from your PDF files.  In the extraction options, you can select the folder to extract the content to.  You can enter a specific folder as shown below:

or you can use tags to create subfolders based off the source PDF file.  For example, if you want to store the content to a subfolder named after the source PDF file, use the <FILENAME_NOEXT> tag e.g.

If we wanted to further group the content by the page number they were extracted from, we would add the <PAGENUMBER> tag e.g.

The :0000 is a formatting option that formats the page number to 4 digits with leading zeroes.

PDF to Word extraction

Task – you need to extract text and images from your PDF files and store them in Microsoft Word files.

Options – you can find hundreds of online sites that can do that for you.

Concern – your files are confidential, and you’re not sure if those sites are making copies of your files for ‘other’ purposes.

Practicality – you want to extract from hundreds or thousands of files, and processing each file online is going to be veeeeeery boring.

Try Easy PDF Explorer, a Windows application that helps you extract content from PDF to Word files directly on your computer.

User interface

Easy PDF Explorer uses the familiar Windows Explorer interface, so you can easily navigate your folders and select your files.

Select 1 or more PDF files, and Easy PDF Explorer will display the details of each file.  This is one benefit of Easy PDF Explorer – it allows you to work with batches of PDF files easily.

Extracting text and images from PDF to Word

When you want to extract text and images from PDF to Word, click on the Extract to Microsoft Word button:

This brings up the Extract to Microsoft Word window.

Enter the folder you want to store the extracted pages in and the file naming convention for the Word files.

 

For images, you can specify the maximum image size.  This means images larger than the entered width or height are resized to fit the entered dimensions.

In the example below, Easy PDF Explorer resizes any images wider or taller than 400 pixels to fit a 400 x 400 size.  Easy PDF Explorer maintains the aspect ratio when resizing the images.

 

You can also choose to exclude images smaller than a specific width or height where blank images are used as spacers, and you don’t want to include them in your Word file.

In the example below, Easy PDF Explorer will not extract images smaller than 2 pixels wide or 2 pixels tall.

 

And that’s all there is to it.  Use Easy PDF Explorer to extract text and images from PDF to Word from your hundreds or thousands of PDF files, on your computer, securely and fast.

 

Other Easy PDF Explorer features

In addition to extracting pages and splitting PDF files, Easy PDF Explorer can also:

Download a 14-day trial now, and see how Easy PDF Explorer can help you work with your PDF files faster and safer.

Extract text from PDF files

Task – you need to extract text from your PDF files

Options – you can find hundreds of online sites that can do that for you.

Concern – your files are confidential, and you’re not sure if those sites are making copies of your files for ‘other’ purposes.

Practicality – you want to extract text from hundreds or thousands of files, and processing each file online is going to be veeeeeery boring.

Try Easy PDF Explorer, a Windows application that helps you extract text your PDF files directly on your computer.

User interface

Easy PDF Explorer uses the familiar Windows Explorer interface, so you can easily navigate your folders and select your files.

Select 1 or more PDF files, and Easy PDF Explorer will display the details of each file.  This is one benefit of Easy PDF Explorer – it allows you to work with batches of PDF files easily.

Extract text from PDF

When you want to start extracting text from your PDF files, click on the Extract text button:

This brings up the Extract Text window.

You need to enter the folder you want to store the extracted text in.  You also need to provide the naming convention for the extracted pages, and if you want the text from each page to be saved to a different file.

In this example, we will be storing the images from each file in its own folder.

We use the <FILENAME_NOEXT> tag, so for a file named Accounting.pdf, all text from that file will be stored in the f:\exports\Accounting\ folder.

We will use the default naming convention of <FILENAME_NOEXT>_text.txt.

This uses the PDF file name and append the _text value to the file.  So in our example, our extracted text will be stored in a file named Accounting_text.txt.

Next, we need to choose if we want to store all the text from our PDF file into a single file, or separate them by pages into individual files.

If we choose a single file as per the above screenshot, we can enter a page separator value.  The default page separator will separate each page this way:

If you choose to store the text from each page in a separate file, then you need to enter a suffix for each of the files.

 

 

 

 

The default suffix of _<PAGENUMBER:0000> will create files this way:

And that’s all there is to it.  Use Easy PDF Explorer to extract text from your hundreds or thousands of PDF files, on your computer, securely and fast.

 

Other Easy PDF Explorer features

In addition to extracting text from your PDF files, Easy PDF Explorer can also:

Download a 14-day trial now, and see how Easy PDF Explorer can help you work with your PDF files faster and safer.

Extract images from PDF files

Task – you need to extract images from your PDF files

Options – you can find hundreds of online sites that can do that for you.

Concern – your files are confidential, and you’re not sure if those sites are making copies of your files for ‘other’ purposes.

Practicality – you want to extract images from hundreds or thousands of files, and processing each file online is going to be veeeeeery boring.

Try Easy PDF Explorer, a Windows application that helps you extract images your PDF files directly on your computer.

User interface

Easy PDF Explorer uses the familiar Windows Explorer interface, so you can easily navigate your folders and select your files.

Select 1 or more PDF files, and Easy PDF Explorer will display the details of each file.  This is one benefit of Easy PDF Explorer – it allows you to work with batches of PDF files easily.

Extract images from PDF

When you want to start extracting images from your PDF files, click on the Extract images button:

This brings up the Extract Images window.

You need to enter the folder you want to store the extracted images in, and provide the naming convention for each extracted image file.

In this example, we will be storing the images from each file in its own folder.

 

 

 

We use the <FILENAME_NOEXT> tag, so for a file named Accounting.pdf, all images from that file will be stored in the f:\exports\Accounting\ folder.

For each images, we will use the default naming convention of <FILENAME_NOEXT>_<PAGENUMBER:0000>_<IMAGEINDEX:0000>.

 

 

 

This uses the PDF file name, page number, and image index on each page to name the image files.  E.g. for the 4th image (jpg) on the 12th page from the Accounting.pdf file, the image file will be named

Accounting_0012_0004.jpg

Once we have set up our destination folder and file naming convention, we click on the Start button, and Easy PDF Explorer does the rest.

And that’s all there is to it.  Use Easy PDF Explorer to extract images from your hundreds or thousands of PDF files, on your computer, securely and fast.

Other Easy PDF Explorer features

In addition to extracting images from your PDF files, Easy PDF Explorer can also:

Download a 14-day trial now, and see how Easy PDF Explorer can help you work with your PDF files faster and safer.

Easy PDF Search

Easy PDF Search is our advanced PDF indexing and search tool.  Read how Roberto Mantovani, Assistant Professor at the University of Urbino (Italy), uses Easy PDF Search to help him search his collection of over 12000 PDF files totalling over 320 GB in size.