Re: editable pdfs

["Chris Madsen" cmadsen@xxxxxxxx]

There is a free tool available that extracts text from a PDF, just the raw
words. You can also use it to export to Word or HTML, with varying levels of
success. Since PDF contains codes that position each and every line, the
HTML files have hard-coded coordinates in them.

You can find this stuff at www.pdf995.com .

If you are looking to "touch up" the text, an inexpensive tool is PDF Editor
from www.cadkas.com . While English is clearly not the author's first
language, the company is very responsive to problems, in my experience. But
touching up text is still tedious, given the nature of PDFs. I looked at a
number of tools before I settled on this one. Adobe refused to upgrade my
Acrobat 4.0 because I couldn't find the serial number, even though I had the
original CD in my hands. If you can afford it, Acrobat is the way to go. If
not, try PDF Editor.

Chris

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Troop" 
To: 
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 2:16 PM
Subject: editable pdfs


>
> >Of course with the T text tool in Acrobat, it is just as easy to copy
> >reams of text, if the PDF is "unlocked" to Xywrite or Notabene.
>
> Not in my experience. First of all, you have to worry about carriage
> returns after lines. But there's something more worrisome when you paste
> text from a pdf. You lose a word here and there, and there's a particular
> problem with hyphenated words the details of which elude me just now.
Let's
> put it this way: every time I have ever "pasted" text from a pdf to a word
> processor, careful proofreading has always revealed a problem. The problem
> may be small, but it's there. Perhaps this program deals with that?
>
> But I doubt it. A pdf is in the end not formatted text but a precise
> PostScript stream. It is above all not intended to be editable. PDF was
> conceptualized from the start as non-editable. That every jerk in the
world
> wants to treat it as an editable format is unfortunate, and perhaps should
> have been anticipated by Adobe. But if it had been, PDF would never have
> come to exist.
>
> What we really need is people who have the brains to send an editable
> document along with the pdf, whenever there is a need. But that is way
> beyond the vast majority of computer users.
>
> There is only one true tool for editing pdf files and that is Adobe
> Illustrator. But that's not much help with a text document, not least
> because it is a single page app.
>
>