Hi All,
I'm getting a bit bored with Japanese recently but I'm still chipping away at it most days. Anyway in preparation for some travel to Spain (hopefully this year) and Central / South America (hopefully in future years) I've been studying a bit of Spanish. Well I'm really just getting started. I'm a bit tired of too much SRS so I'm adopting an alternative approach consisting of
1. Listening to Pimsleur in the car, mainly to train my ears at spanish
2. Practicing a bit of Assimil in the evenings
3. Studying some basic Grammar

Now at some point I would like to start drilling some vocab. I have a pdf of the book by Dorothy Richmond - Practice makes perfect Spanish Vocabulary. In this book she presents 10,000 vocabulary words along with the basics of spanish grammar. Most of the vocabulary lists are presented in shaded boxes. If there is a line by itself in the shaded box it is typically the title of the list of vocabulary (also it is in a different font). Then there are four columns english word - corresponding spanish word , english word - corresponding spanish word.

What I would like to do is extract these lists into an excel file or similar I can import into an SRS. Does anyone have any knowledge or experience extracting information from a pdf file and can give me some hints or pointers?

If it is possible to detect when the shading begins and ends, and what font size is used, it will be relatively easy to extract the information.

There are a lot of similarities between English and spanish vocabulary, so hopefully I can absorb the vocab at a faster rate than Japanese vocabulary. Although learning all those irregular verb conjugations looks to be an obstacle ! ha ha