Extracting text from PDF in Access 2007

Hello,

I have an Access database where I need to convert PDF files to text. I know there are many PDF-to-text converters, but I need to do it from my VBA code, and I need something distributable as this is part of an Access runtime which is used by many different companies. So a freely redistributable dll like this one is ideal. I had purchased Ingo's excellent PDFText dll, but unfortunately when I moved from Access 2000 to Access 2007, the code would crash every time I got to the GetPDFText line. The GetPDFPageCount still worked, though, oddly enough, as did Ingo's test application. I contacted Ingo and he made very helpful suggestions, but nothing seemed to make it work. So, now I'm trying the QuickPDF library to see if I have better results - sadly, I have the same problem. I have tried three different functions: GetPageText, ExtractFilePageText, and DAExtractPageText. I have tried each of these functions with the four different extract options available. I've also created the Access databases in three formats (from within Access 2007): Access 2000 compatible, Access 2002-2003 compatible, and an Access 2007 accdb file. So, a total of 36 different combinations, all with the same result: everything works perfectly up to the line that actually attempts the text extraction...then Access crashes without so much as a sigh.

I'm happy to post my code if anyone wants to look at it and tell me where I'm going wrong. I'm running under Windows Vista.

Thanks in advance for any assistance...I've run out of ideas!

Erika

Hi Rowan,

All the other functions I've tried work; in the test code I created, I used:

• QuickPDFCreateLibrary
• QuickPDFUnlockKey
• QuickPDFLoadFromFile
  
  
• QuickPDFSelectDocument
• QuickPDFSelectPage
• QuickPDFGetPageText*
  
  
• QuickPDFExtractFilePageText*
  
  
• QuickPDFDAOpenFileReadOnly
• QuickPDFDAGetPageCount
• QuickPDFDAExtractPageText*
  
  
• QuickPDFDACloseFile
• QuickPDFReleaseLibrary

The starred functions are the only ones that don't work. The three center groups of functions represent the three methods I attmepted for the extraction. In each case, only the final function, where the extraction is attempted, fails and crashes Access.

This happens no matter what pdf I use, big or small, older or newer format.

I haven't tried running this test in a database specifically created IN Access 2000, but I suspect that in that environment it would work fine. As I said, this is the identical issue I had with Ingo's wonderful PDFtext.dll, which works perfectly in Access 2000 on this same computer, as does his test program, H_PDFtext.exe. It just doesn't work in any flavor of database created in Access 2007.

So I am just here, scratching my head! :)

Thanks for your help,
Erika

Also, perhaps if you're able to send me your MS Access 2007 project -- or at least a small replication that demonstrates the problem -- then I can test it on my machine. My email is:

Hi Erika, I know this is quite an old post but I'm currently facing exactly the same problem.