List Documents with blank pages

Hi all,

is there any way, to get a list with searchable pdf documents who has blank pages? Page one has text and the second page has no text.

Thank,
André

Currently, no.

As Jim noted, there’s not a direct way to do this.

But as a workaround kludge (I love kludges!), here’s an approach:

  1. Many such PDFs from newspaper or journal archives contain a first page about the source of the document that contains text, to which is appended image-only pages of the article (which are not searchable unless OCR is performed on the PDF).

  2. Select such a PDF, then choose Data > Convert > to plain text. This will result in a new plain text file that contains all of the searchable text.

  3. Check the word count of that plain text file. To account for possible variations among such documents, add a bit, perhaps 20%, to that number of words.

  4. Create a new smart group by performing a search using the Advanced tab of the full Search window (Tools > Search) using these filters:
    All of the following are true:
    Kind is PDF/PS
    Word Count is less than or equal to [your word count number] (don’t enter the brackets)

  5. Create and name your new smart group by clicking the “+” button to the right of the query field.

  6. When viewing the smart group list, make sure that the Kind column (View > Columns > Kind is visible.

Discussion: The documents listed may include some that have Kind = PDF. Ignore those and look at those with Kind = PDF+Text. Of course, the list may also include some fully searchable PDFs that are short ones and that don’t include appended non-searchable pages. Nevertheless, you should be able to quickly recognize the first page content of the kind of documents you are looking for, so this kludge can be useful.

Thank you for the workaround. I will test it tomorrow. :slight_smile: