Copy All Text from PDF to Windows Clipboard

Question

I'm working in VBA (MS Office 2010) and want to extract some key words from PDF attachments that I regularly receive in Outlook.

I planned to save the PDFs as a Word documents and extract the text from these but apparently I cannot do this programatically as I'm using Acrobat X Standard (seems I would need Pro).

So, am now looking for a way to copy all text from a PDF doc to the Windows clipboard using Acrobat Library methods. I will then paste into Word (this copy/paste works fine when done manually - no corruption of text).

I have very limited experience working with Acrobat and am reviewing the Acrobat SDK resources etc. but proving challenging.

How can I select all text in a PDF document and copy it to the Windows clipboard using Acrobat Library methods in VBA?

Answer 1

For reference, I resolved using the code below.

This quickly coverts a PDF file into a text file and from there key words can be selected and read into a string, put into the clipboard etc.

This is working with Adobe X Standard.

Code is from http://forum.chandoo.org/threads/vba-to-convert-pdf-to-txt.14245/

Dim AcroXApp As Acrobat.AcroApp
Dim AcroXAVDoc As Acrobat.AcroAVDoc
Dim AcroXPDDoc As Acrobat.AcroPDDoc
Dim Filename As String
Dim jsObj As Object
Dim NewFileName As String

Filename = "C:\Documents and Settings\xxx\Desktop\file01.pdf"
NewFileName = "U:\file.txt"

Set AcroXApp = CreateObject("AcroExch.App")
'AcroXApp.Show

Set AcroXAVDoc = CreateObject("AcroExch.AVDoc")
AcroXAVDoc.Open Filename, "Acrobat"
AcroXApp.Hide 'my additon - needed?

Set AcroXPDDoc = AcroXAVDoc.GetPDDoc

Set jsObj = AcroXPDDoc.GetJSObject

jsObj.SaveAs NewFileName, "com.adobe.acrobat.plain-text"

AcroXAVDoc.Close False
AcroXApp.Hide
AcroXApp.Exit

End Sub