British Rainfall Books - Combining PDF Files

[Paul C]

Hi

For several years I have been collecting books from the British Rainfall series. All started off in the 1860's I think and until about 1991 an annual book was produced listing all the rainfall data in the UK. For me it was fascinating to look back at the historical records and compare with todays rainfall totals.

Sadly part of my collection was ruined following a water leak and I have been struggling to find any more of these books at reasonable cost. So If anyone has any of these books and you would like to sell them please get in touch.

The Met office have now digitised the entire collection and they are on line at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/archive/british-rainfall

These are pdf files, which I am now downloading and saving making it easy to search for data/places etc.

Question - is there a way to combine every single pdf file into one mega pdf file, to act like a database for me to search quickly and easily ?

thanks

[sfws]

Others will have more computer experience than me, but the short answer to your question is Yes.

Question - is there a way to combine every single pdf file into one mega pdf file?

Avanquest software's Expert PDF (that I use) can merge a number of PDF files into one (I have only used the opposite, extracting part of a PDF), so I expect there are several different software options for you to explore if you do a search online for PDF merging software.

Question - is there a way to ... search quickly and easily ?

How quick it would be I cannot answer. You might be better off using software to turn PDF into another format that could go into a database, or be read by a database interface such as Libre Office/Open Office provide. It might be a slow one-off process to do the transformation, but could speed up multiple queries later. I do use my Expert PDF software to extract text and pictures to other formats, but I have not yet needed to extract numbers.

[Paul C]

Thanks for the reply

The software you mention was quite expensive so I found another one with a 14 day trial, which appears to work - just combined 1864-1900, took about 5mins to process, but now its open can quickly and easily search the information. Just need to download frpm 1900-1991 - going to take a few hours

http://sodapdf.com/products

[sfws]

A lot of megabytes to download and to study. Interesting to know it is quick to search.

The software you mention was quite expensive so I found another one

Just what I was encouraging you to do. The Expert PDF software version I have is old with many fewer features than later expensive updates.

[Paul C]

The "search" was quite quick.

I typed in Seathwaite to start as I knew there would be a few entries, within just a few seconds it brought up the first entry, it was then just a simple click of the mouse for the next entry and so on.

Certainly working better than I had hoped