This is a slight divergence from my Acrobat tips, but I just tried a new tool from Markzware called PageZephyr and am impressed enough to want to share the experience, particularly if you are an InDesign or QuarkXPress user.

PageZephyr indexes text from InDesign and Quark, without having those applications available, or if you do. It's very fast, and indexed over 300 documents (mostly InDesign and some legacy Quark documents as well) in less than a minute. Once indexed you can select a file and PageZephyr will show the text within the document, by text block. Using the Command key, multiple text blocks can be selected in the same or different documents. From there you can save the text as an RTF or TXT. Of course you can copy and paste text from one or multiple documents into another application such as InDesign or Word or anything else. You can also format the text (fonts), save it and reimport it into InDesign as I have done in the example below.



In this case, I selected text from an InDesign document in PageZephyr, selected a different font, saved it as an RTF and placed it back into the InDesign document.

Another option is to select text from a document and post it directly to your free blog that is included with PageZephyr.

Here are the main components of PageZephyr. In the Activity window, the 11 items that failed were very old Quark documents.



My experiences with PageZephyr were very good. It's fast and will speed accessing text from documents without opening InDesign or Quark for repurposing. It does more than I expected and that is as good of a recommendation as I can give anything.