My father-in-law came to me yesterday and asked (This was out of the blue and quite unexpected) to write a program for him that would take some information from a web-page, do a few very simple (division a few times) calculations and show it to him.

I said, "Sure that's easy, give me a day or two!".
Silly me.
The data he is looking at is stored as a PDF, and although I have installed the PDF::Parse package I can't get it to work. I have seen others say that it is buggy as well.

I've searched using a super search, and all I can find is people creating PDF files.

I think if I could find an example of someone using the PDF::Parse package I could get it working, but Perl complains that certain functions used on the cpan documentation page don't exist (cut'n'paste). I would wager I'm doing something wrong, but I'm not sure of the intended usage.

Has anyone parsed pdf files, and if so what method did you use? I would prefer a perl-only solution, as I'm writing the code on a Linux box, and he will be running it on a WinXP machine.

Also the less I have to install the better, my Father-in-law is a bright guy, but his computer usage level is browsing a few websites and that's about it.

Thanks!

In reply to Reading PDF files by Helter

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