Introduction and PDF question

["Brad Whittington" <brad -dot- techwriter -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Aloha, ya'll,

I've been lurking for 6 or 7 weeks and thought I'd crawl out of the
wainscoting and ask a question. I headed the question below in caps in
case you want to skip my obligatory intro and cut to the chase.

First, a quick introduction. I've been writing for 25 years and have
held jobs in hi-tech from the days of punched cards (mainframe) and
CPM (micros, as they were called back then). However, I am using a
layoff from a Product Marketing position to transition into freelance
technical writing.

I must send out a very large THANKS for all the valuable info that
comes across this list daily. I've been drinking at the fire hose for
the last month and while the volume can be daunting, the information
is as varied as it is useful. It's nice to hear multiple takes instead
of the party line.

My next project is learning the tools. First up is FrameMaker. Once I
can produce a document there with the minimum level of pain, I'll look
to the group for recommendations of where to self-train next. (Was
thinking RoboHelp, but we'll cross that bridge later.)

I spent an hour in the archives today and found excellent suggestions
in the December file for learning Framemaker. Thanks again!

NOW FOR MY QUESTION:

To build up my portfolio, I have scanned several magazine articles at
1,200 dpi (selected after reading the timely discussion of graphics
earlier this month) and saved them as PDFs. Each page is a separate
file. For my first FrameMaker project I decided to combine the files
for multi-page articles into a single PDF. I fired up the software and
searched the help and came up with a solution.

1. Create a blank document
2. For each page, do a File | Import | File of the PDF pages
3. Save the multi-page document as a PDF

It worked but the resolution of the new PDF is not near as good as the
original pages. IN addition, I noticed that the resolution looked the
same regardless of whether I chose Standard or High Quality Print. I
also tried this approach with similar results.

1. Create a document
2. Bring up a page in Acrobat Reader
3. Copy the page to the clipboard with the highlight tool
4. Paste the clipboard to the FM document
5. Repeat for each page
6. Save the multi-page document as a PDF

So, I'm open to suggestions on ways to combine multiple PDF files of
scanned articles into a single PDF file, with or without the use of
FrameMaker. Ideas?

--
Brad Whittington
Austin, TX
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