According to this news source, Rush Limbaugh recently accused the Democrats of "reformatting" the economic stimulus bill into a PDF, thereby thwarting the his effort to search the bill's text.
I seriously doubt that the bill was published in non-searchable PDF format, but even it it had been the he could have easily solved his problem by making the bill searchable. I know he'd rather take the opportunity to blast democrats than to solve a small technical hurdle. Just for the record: I'm not offended by Limbaugh's accusations about the Democrats, but I'd prefer he not disparage the good name of PDFs in the process.
Had the bill actually been in a PDF format that was un-searchable/protected/etc., the best approach would be to load it in a PDF reader under Linux. One of the standard by-products to open-source utilities under Linux is for the program to "crack" file formats before loading them, so they can be displayed properly. Load the PDF in a linux reader, do a save-as to a MS-Word document, then load it into MS-Word or OpenOffice.org and go from there.
Posted by: YatPundit | February 16, 2009 at 02:27 PM