print to text file help needed!

[Boatman]

At work, I've got a lot of data I need to analyze in Excel. The Unix machine
that I need to get the data off of will print the data in tabular form to
paper, but there is no easy way to extract the data from a native file. Of
course, I could print out the data, and then scan it with an OCR program on
my WXP machine, but that would be very tedious for the amount of data we
have. I can print to a file, however. Of course, this is not ascii data that
I can easily move into a spreadsheet, but perhaps there is a program to
convert this to a text file.

Any help or other ideas would be appreciated!

Boatman

 

[(ProteanThread)]

At work, I've got a lot of data I need to analyze in Excel. The Unix machine
that I need to get the data off of will print the data in tabular form to
paper, but there is no easy way to extract the data from a native file. Of
course, I could print out the data, and then scan it with an OCR program on
my WXP machine, but that would be very tedious for the amount of data we
have. I can print to a file, however. Of course, this is not ascii data that
I can easily move into a spreadsheet, but perhaps there is a program to
convert this to a text file.

Any help or other ideas would be appreciated!

Boatman

tried saving in CSV ?

 

[Boatman]

No, that's not an option, but thanks.

Boatman

tried saving in CSV ?


--
Woodzy

http://www.rtdos.com (alt OS for games based on the classics)
http://rtdos.com/community.htm ( retro computing community )

 

[me]

At work, I've got a lot of data I need to analyze in Excel.
The Unix machine that I need to get the data off of will
print the data in tabular form to paper, but there is no
easy way to extract the data from a native file. Of course,
I could print out the data, and then scan it with an OCR
program on my WXP machine, but that would be very tedious
for the amount of data we have. I can print to a file,
however. Of course, this is not ascii data that I can
easily move into a spreadsheet, but perhaps there is a
program to convert this to a text file.

Any help or other ideas would be appreciated!

Boatman

Unix does not allow you to redirect printer output to a disk
file???

J

 

[wald]

At work, I've got a lot of data I need to analyze in Excel. The
Unix machine that I need to get the data off of will print the
data in tabular form to paper, but there is no easy way to
extract the data from a native file.

I'm curious about the format of the data on the UNIX machine. Is it
stored in a database of some sort? I can't believe the only way to
get them out is printing them.

Seriously, printing and OCR'ing the whole thing sounds a bit mind-
boggling, the worst solution for yourself, the environment and the
machines.

regards,
Wald

 

[Boatman]

At work, I've got a lot of data I need to analyze in Excel.

Unix does not allow you to redirect printer output to a disk
file???

J

Yes, that's what I meant by "I can print to a file". But the format of that
file, when I open it with Wordpad, is not anything usable. It's certainly
not a text file that mirrors the actual printed page, which would have been
very useful. I think it's a file that could be printed out by a print
driver, but I'm guessing here. What I would love is some kind of conversion
utility which would take that print file and convert it to a "real" text
file (one that would "look" like the printed output). I hope this time I was
a little clearer! Thanks for your reply.

Boatman

 

[Boatman]

I'm curious about the format of the data on the UNIX machine. Is it

stored in a database of some sort? I can't believe the only way to
get them out is printing them.

Seriously, printing and OCR'ing the whole thing sounds a bit mind-
boggling, the worst solution for yourself, the environment and the
machines.

regards,
Wald

The format of the data on the UNIX machine does not appear to be anything I
can easily use. When I open it with WordPad, I recognize some text that's
easily understandable, but the "data" I'm after is embedded in a kind of
binary format that appears (to me) to be gibberish. I'm sure if I knew a lot
more about coding I could extract it, but right now my abilities are pretty
much import ASCII data into Excel. Thanks for your reply.

Boatman

 

[me]

Yes, that's what I meant by "I can print to a file". But
the format of that file, when I open it with Wordpad, is
not anything usable. It's certainly not a text file that
mirrors the actual printed page, which would have been very
useful. I think it's a file that could be printed out by a
print driver, but I'm guessing here. What I would love is
some kind of conversion utility which would take that print
file and convert it to a "real" text file (one that would
"look" like the printed output). I hope this time I was a
little clearer! Thanks for your reply.

Boatman

That's not what I meant. Let's try something different.

Can you display the data as ASCI ("human-readable" form) on the
monitor? If the answer is "yes," redirect the output (stdout?)
to a disk file.

J

 

[Boatman]

That's not what I meant. Let's try something different.

Can you display the data as ASCI ("human-readable" form) on the
monitor? If the answer is "yes," redirect the output (stdout?)
to a disk file.

Not really. I can scroll through the data on a window that appears on the
screen, but it doesn't appear as a "page." I would be interested on how you
can redirect the output, though. I should mention that the data only appears
through a running application. I cannot go to a terminal window and see the
data. Maybe that helps explain?

Boatman

 

[me]

Not really. I can scroll through the data on a window that
appears on the screen, but it doesn't appear as a "page." I
would be interested on how you can redirect the output,
though. I should mention that the data only appears through
a running application. I cannot go to a terminal window and
see the data. Maybe that helps explain?

Boatman

Yes, it does help.
Perhaps you could aks at a Unix newsgroup (I don't "do" Unix).

J

 

[canetoad]

At work, I've got a lot of data I need to analyze in Excel. The Unix machine
that I need to get the data off of will print the data in tabular form to
paper, but there is no easy way to extract the data from a native file. Of
course, I could print out the data, and then scan it with an OCR program on
my WXP machine, but that would be very tedious for the amount of data we
have. I can print to a file, however. Of course, this is not ascii data that
I can easily move into a spreadsheet, but perhaps there is a program to
convert this to a text file.

Any help or other ideas would be appreciated!

I don't know a thing about Unix, but as you say the data is tabular
format, can you print to file as 'tab delimited' format?

If so, then just name the file 'data.xls', forcing Excel to open it.
Then save as an excel workbook, overwriting the previous save.

 

[REM]

The format of the data on the UNIX machine does not appear to be anything I
can easily use. When I open it with WordPad, I recognize some text that's
easily understandable, but the "data" I'm after is embedded in a kind of
binary format that appears (to me) to be gibberish. I'm sure if I knew a lot
more about coding I could extract it, but right now my abilities are pretty
much import ASCII data into Excel. Thanks for your reply.

What program do you use to view and print the data?

As suggested, look for a "save to file option" or an option to
"export" the data to another format that you can use, such as Excel.

What is the extension of the data file? yourdatafile.xxx

Google might supply suggestions if you can identify what type of a
file you are viewing and what you are viewing it with.

You might ask the tech guy for assistance in writing a script that
opens the program with the data file and redirects the output to a
straight ascii file.

$ ./myProgram < myData.xxx > AtextFile.txt
$ exit

Something like that anyway...

 

[John Fitzsimons]

The format of the data on the UNIX machine does not appear to be anything I
can easily use. When I open it with WordPad, I recognize some text that's
easily understandable, but the "data" I'm after is embedded in a kind of
binary format that appears (to me) to be gibberish. I'm sure if I knew a lot
more about coding I could extract it, but right now my abilities are pretty
much import ASCII data into Excel. Thanks for your reply.

Sounds to me like you might have unicode characters causing problems.

Consider EditPad Lite :

http://www.editpadlite.com/editpadlite.html

"EditPad reads and writes UNIX (LF only) and Mac (CR only) text files
(in addition to DOS/Win CR+LF files, of course)."

"ANSI <=> Unicode conversion (UCS-2 and UTF-8)"

etc.

Another possibility in addition to, or instead of, the above is a hex
editor. IIRC some extract readable text from a file. Though I cannot
recommend a particular one I am sure someone else here could.

Let us know whether either/both ideas work for you.

Regards, John.
--
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/ Oz \ John Fitzsimons - Melbourne, Australia.
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v http://clients.net2000.com.au/~johnf/

 

[Boatman]

I was able to accomplish my task and here is what I did:

The UNIX computer allows me to print the data page(s) to a file,,, a
PostScript file (no ASCII, CSV, tab delimited or anything like that). As I
found out, PostScript files contain the page data as well as lots of
formatting commands; there was no way to extract the actual data from the PS
file. I found online a PS to ASCII conversion utility (I was just looking
for it again - I'm at home now - but can't find it right off). This
converted the PS file to something that when viewed with Notepad, looked
very much like the printed page. I easily imported this into Excel and am
able to manipulate the data as I want.

Thanks for all the help and advice. When I find the name of the name of the
conversion program, I'll post it here.

Boatman