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Subject:Converting PDF to Word or FrameMaker? From:"Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 16 Dec 2003 08:59:25 -0500
Tom Green wonders: <<I have a 300-page manual that is heavy with line art.
Trouble is, the only source file is in PDF. No Word, no FrameMaker. I need
to convert this to FrameMaker.>>
The full version of Acrobat has a "save as RTF" function, but in my
experience (Acrobat 5), it's a bloody disaster if you have threaded stories.
Better than retyping, but it'll still be lots of work correcting Acrobat's
lunatic notions of text flow.
You may have better luck with a newish product called PDF Converter
(http://www.scansoft.com/pdfconverter/), which does a credible job of
extracting text from PDF files. It's basically OCR, and thus you'll have to
proofread the results, but the results should be pretty good given that it's
working from binary images rather than relatively low-res printouts. I don't
know how well it handles graphics, but for the same reason (working directly
on binaries), I image it'll do a decent job with them too.
Once you've got the file in Word, moving it to Frame should be relatively
easy (via RTF), but I haven't tried this so I can't say how much new layout
work you'll be creating for yourself.
--Geoff Hart, ghart -at- [delete]videotron -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
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