Can I pull data from a PDF and insert it into container fields?

[HALBURN]

I have a customer that emails our company many purchase orders each day as a PDF's. (The text in is not rasterized).

 

I need to pull the following information from the purchase orders and insert it into the corresponding fields:

 

Purchase Order Date

Purchase Order #

Revision #

Purchasing Agent

Delivery Date

Total PO Dollar Amount

 

Is there a way to automate this process, perhaps with a plugin?

[Steve E.]

Adobe  Acrobat Pro has a good OCR tool. You could convert the PDF back to text with it before importing. But I'm not sure how you automate this.

 

However, this sounds to me like the customer and you would be better off changing either the actual work flow or the data tracking process so that the original PO (text PDF) is input into the database and not a scan of it after its been filled in and printed. Then it could be easily parsed for the relevant information since the particular fields are all in the same location for all POs.

 

Is there a reason this can't be done, such as the POs are hand written? If so, it might be cheaper in the long run to rearrange the process and/or add some equipment (a tablet?) to have all data digitally input.

[Steve E.]

Halburn, , re-reading your post, I realize that I probably misunderstood and these are POs that you need to fill (and track the data from), not just keep track of (the customer is buying something from you and you are not just tracking their data).

 

If the customer can't send these as raster files (text PDFs), then probably doing OCR in Acrobat Pro is easiest.

Or maybe you could have them redo the PO as a 'fillable' PDF form so that they would be doing them on their computer t start with? Or maybe you create the PO form for them? Again, you can do this with Adobe Acrobat Pro.