I want to bring out a paperback version of The Catholic Orangemen of Togo. It remains available free online in various places. Unfortunately I cannot find an electronic version of the original text, it being somewhere on what has become a large collection of dead laptops.
I therefore subscribed to Adobe Professional and tried to convert one of the online PDFs, but the result was gobbledegook. Can anyone help me with this, and provide a version I can work on in Word or any other programme which works with Open Office Writer? I need to make a couple of corrections and reformat.
If anybody is really clever and can change the text on the cover artwork to a flame orange that can be read, that would be great too.
The contact button at the top of the page works to get me.
Thanks x
I likewise have a collection of dead laptops. Perhaps if you asked the NSA nicely they would let you have one of their copies! 🙂
Sorry, I have not much idea. However if you know somebody who works with laptops you can probably get the original back. Dead laptops do not necessarily mean dead hard-disks and these are interchangeable. Good luck!
There are various online services for converting PDF to Word. Here’s one:
www (dot) pdftoword (dot) com
Or you can try the software for free for a fortnight. I’ve used that for small files, don’t know how good it would be for one enormous file.
Sent by email
Converting .pdf to any other format will almost always result in the need to do some (or a lot) of fettling of the resulting text.
Hi Craig
Converting the pdf to text does indeed give gobbledegook. Happily however, it is a simple substitution code.
For example
! = C
” = r
# = a
$= i
% = g
& = space
It would take me a couple of hours to decode in its entirety. Let me know if you cannot fins a better solution.
Cheers
! = C
” = r
Print out the pdf, scan it and run it through OCR text recognition. Save to a more sensible format and edit. Bit of a faff but you will get there 🙂
Hi Craig,
Found the free version online, and can do a cut and paste directly from web to word, It works but am sure it would all get funked up if I tried all pages at once.
So I can begin parcels of word files till it all gets done, or are there certain pages you want straight away ?
Most Linux distros can use a common package called poppler-utils to convert pdf files to a variety of other formats including plaintext, using pdftotext. If I can locate a copy of the pdf (I do have a copy saved somewhere) I’ll forward by email.
Result is gobbledygook too, sorry, will have to leave it for now, going out.
pdftotext worked for me on the file mainpeterborough.pdf (size 1007210) and I have mailed the result to Craig.
Have emailed your book as a txt file to mail.ru
Hope this helps
Regards
ps
It’s on my dropbox account. Follow the link and download. Easy peasey…
I use http://www.zamzar.com/
They’ll convert just about anything to what ever format you require within a few minutes
Link to front cover with flame orange heading sent to mail.ru
Any other changes, email me.
Craig: Delighted that you are bringing out a paperback update of your West Africa book. It remains more relevant than many might think, because you provided telling evidence against the claim that is often made that the UK’s intervention in Sierra Leone was a “good” example of the Blairite doctrine of liberal interventionism. It’s also a great read, as I and others noted in our reader reviews on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/product/0956129900/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt/278-8108117-6537909?_encoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
Cross-posting from the Theresa May Must Resign thread, which people may now wish to revive in light of today’s news.
CAGE Reveals Government’s Squandered Opportunities In Efforts To Secure Alan Henning’s Release:
http://cageuk.org/node/1379
Moazzam Begg approached the FCO offering to conduct high-level negotiations for the release of Henning a week before Theresa May ordered him arrested.
Further press release promised for tomorrow.
It would be good if it were available as an ePub
(to save on dead trees).
My Kobo eReader doesn’t handle PDFs too well – had
I access to the raw text, I would make an ePub for
myself.
For future reference, Craig, it is a simple matter these days, to remove an old laptop’s hard drive and slip it into an inexpensive external 2.5″ drive housing (check Amazon), so you can use a USB cable to access the drive and retrieve your files. Almost as easy as using a memory card.
I read Orangemen and enjoyed it. It was a good read, as indeed was Murder in Samarkand.
Moon of Alabama, January 13, 2009.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2009/01/the-catholic-orangemen-of-togo.html
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A hope over fear rally George Square Sunday 12 Noon till 5pm, speakers and 12 bands performing live.
We may have lost the referendum, but we must continue to push.
http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/opinion/columnists/gails-gab-i-am-excited-for-the-hopeoverfear-rally-in-glasgow.1412672490
More on Sunday’s Hope over Fear Rally.
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=ak95x2&s=8#.VDQu3cVdVDQ
If you can make it please go and show your support.
I am a Zionist,” Conservative Party leader David Cameron told an audience of party supporters of Israel in London on Tuesday. “If what you mean by Zionist, is someone who believes that the Jews have a right to a homeland in Israel and a right to their country then, yes, I am a Zionist and I’m proud of the fact that Conservative politicians down the ages have played a huge role in helping to bring this about,” Cameron declared.
The Conservative leader was guest of honor at the Conservative Friends of Israel annual business lunch, which was attended by some 500 people – including half the parliamentary party, 30 Conservative parliamentary candidates, former leaders, lords and Israel’s ambassador.
Channel 4 In Depth Investigative Report on Zionist Lobbying Groups
___________________________
Info on David Cameron, as he’s likely to be elected again, in the 2015 GE.
http://caltonjock.com/2014/10/07/david-cameron-jewish-zionists-whats-not-to-like/
This very interesting indeed.
https://archive.today/v30Vc
I had a downloaded version, but sorry its on an old PC. Thanks for having made it freely available online and all the best with plans for a paperback edition.
everything on sourceforge is free – used pdfcreator for years
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/?source=directory
For those of you who use Kindles, Kobos or other e-book readers I can heartily recommend the free Calibre software from http://calibre-ebook.com/download which you can use to manage your e-library and to convert between different formats of text.
I didn’t know that ‘Orangemen…’ was freely available so I immediately found a PDF copy and converted it to MOBI for my kindle. Took less than a minute. I also used it to convert the PDF into a TXT file (for free) but got the same coded version.
Another great tool for converting between ebook formats (including pdf) is calibre (calibre-ebook.com). It has pretty good (and tunable) heuristics for guessing formatting and structure.
Hugh it seems to be the embedded graphic for the cover page that trips up most conversion software, get the version from moon of alabama linked above at 6:44pm, which has no cover page and it converts to a fairly tidy plain text using pdftotext and others. If wanting to convert back to a pdf, importing the text to OpenOffice Writer, tidying up, paginating and stuff manually then saving from OO Writer back to pdf works well for me.
Found an android virus bundled with the book in the zipped download from moonofalabama. Best check before downloading