Member offices receive drafts of legislation as PDFs, which they will sometimes put on committee websites or otherwise make available to the public. Unfortunately, it isn't possible to compare multiple drafts against each other, or against other bills, because the PDF format impairs such matching/diffing.
What would be most helpful is a program that converts PDF drafts of legislation to plain text -- including (1) removing the line numbers, (2) removing footer information that provides provenance, (3) concatenating line breaks to take out extra hyphens.
Doing so would allow multiple versions of bills to be compared (i.e. draft to introduced), and also allow people to drop the text into a word processing program for editing and suggestions.
Member offices receive drafts of legislation as PDFs, which they will sometimes put on committee websites or otherwise make available to the public. Unfortunately, it isn't possible to compare multiple drafts against each other, or against other bills, because the PDF format impairs such matching/diffing.
What would be most helpful is a program that converts PDF drafts of legislation to plain text -- including (1) removing the line numbers, (2) removing footer information that provides provenance, (3) concatenating line breaks to take out extra hyphens.
Doing so would allow multiple versions of bills to be compared (i.e. draft to introduced), and also allow people to drop the text into a word processing program for editing and suggestions.