20 dollar HIT in 15 minutes
Once I’ve had the luck to get my hands on a HIT where someone paid 20 dollars to convert a PDF document to a Microsoft Office spreadsheet. The document consisted on a long list of US army bases around the world that also contained the base’s address, phone and fax number along with the name and rank of some officer that was supposed to be in charge of the base. It was a whole lot of work for 20 dollars but… There was a way to just do the same thing in less time. So, I just converted the whole PDF to a UTF-8 text file, that ended up producing a long list of somewhat mangled text. Yet, the text structure was more or less preserved (each address in a line, separated by tabs). So to convert that to a meaningful format I just wrote a small parser in Perl that converted the entire text to CSV format, which worked like a charm. From that I fed it into OpenOffice and tweaked according to the Requester’s wishes. So to put it shortly, I ended up earning a 20 dollar HIT in 15 minutes. Sweet!
