How can i organize text data column by column?

Hi all; I have a dictionary .pdf file contains words and their meanings. Words are line by line and the meanings are under the words (see Figure).

As you see, meanings starting with "*" But some words have more than one meaning. I want to make an excel like that (Fig),

So, how can i do that?

[Guillaume]

The main problem you'll have to solve is extracting the text from the pdf correctly. Depending on the structure of the pdf file it may be slightly complicated up to downright nightmarish to extract the text. So have you got that part sorted?

Doing the rest in matlab is not particularly hard.

Note that the pdf format is not designed to transmit information between computers. It's purely designed for display to humans.

[Geoff Hayes]

Ergün - so you want to create an Excel file from the PDF? You may want to try the Read text from a PDF document submission at the File Exchange.

[Ergün AKGÜN]

Thank you for your quick reply. Actually i don't have any idea about to extract. But when i convert pdf to excel it appears like that:

[Ergün AKGÜN]

No Geoff,i actually want to make a matlab file and than convert it to excel.

[Geoff Hayes]

Ergün's answer moved here

Any comments?

[Geoff Hayes]

I think it will be a challenge to import the PDF file into MATLAB. Have you tried with the above link to the File Exchange submission?

[Christopher Creutzig]

Reading the text into MATLAB may be easy, that's what extractFileText does.

If that is not a solution to the problem, it may be a good idea to have the pdf somewhere people can actually look at it. There is an almost infinite range of possibilities how PDF can be encoded and written.