Dear Friends
Is it possible to read contents from signed scanned pdf copy to SAS proc sql. Please help
You need first to convert your PDF image to text. You then can parse this text using a SAS data step to extract what you need and store it in a SAS table. You need a table to use SQL.
Tika is opensource software that can do such conversion to text. I believe SAS uses Tika (or at least used to) for this as part of Text Analytics.
PDF is a proprietary binary file. SAS cannot read much else other than the plain binary code which unless you understand and can parse it, is of no use. PDF is not a data format, its a render destination. Whilst there are certain packages in python/R and other languages languages to do certain things, even if you do manage to get anything useful out of it would require full QC and probably a lot of work/processing. I would highly recommend either returning to source data which is the preferred method, or worst case, type things in manually. Ultimately PDF is a dreadful format, as far from open as possible, so avoid it as much as possible.
Thanks for the feedback provided. Lets say i can convert pdf to text. Here how can bring check box tick in txt file.
Exactly. How can you bring in things which aren't text. Checkbox could be a PDF object, or a picture. End of the day, you could learn javascript in PDF and export it, or possibly find a third party library to get it (perhaps at a quick search: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55777812/python-pdf-how-to-read-from-form-elements-like-checkbox), but its going to take a fair bit of effort. Go back to source data is really the best option.
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