Thanks for the posts guys, the CAM::PDF seems to be exactly what I need. However, I'm having some pretty extreme difficulties in getting it to install. I managed to get all of the dependencies installed except for one trouble maker - Text::PDF::File. I install it over and over again and it installs successfully with no errors and no failed tests, yet everytime I try to get CAM::PDF installed it complains about Text::PDF::File not being there and attempts to install it again. Probably a versioning problem

So I let and it bombs out during the testing phase because it can't find Text::PDF::FlateDecode. This module has completely alluded me. I can't find it anywhere. It doesn't come up in the depedency list either.

While I've got your attention, perhaps I should elaborate a little on what my project is. I have about 100 pdfs which are technical journals on welding specifications. Welders pay alot of money for people to turn the specifications for a job into a set of legal documents so as to cover there butts if something goes wrong. This is how I view the project thus far and intend to tackle each step as a different problem:

Step 1:
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First have to extract the journals from the pdfs(which are stored as images).

Step 2:
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I will have to OCR the images in order to turn them into character data.

Step 3:
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Use a form of statistical analysis to turn the character data into a searchable database, which will much easier to custom taylor to the needs of the user.

It will be long road and I really appreciate you're help at these early steps.