Re: Acrobat-ics (.PDF to .RTF)

[Ben Weisner <ben -at- WEISNER -dot- COM>]

Nothing like beating a dead horse to get the response you need ;>

Check out http://www.ambia.com for some great Acrobat utilities including
Aerial, a product that will do exactly what you are trying to do, namely
export content from a PDF file to RTF. The best part about this is the
price -- $49 for a commercial license, free for personal, non-commercial
use. Ambia has been around for awhile and has some other excellent products
for keeping your PDF files up-to-date, automating bookmark and hypertext
creation, etc.

Best,

Ben Weisner

P.S., I'll be offering certified Acrobat training later in the year. If
anyone is interested, please contact me via private email with a list of
the topics you might like included in the syllabus.

>Date:    Sat, 29 Mar 1997 12:43:37 -0700
>From:    "Tagader, Frank" <Frank_Tagader -at- JDEDWARDS -dot- COM>
>Subject: Acrobat-ics
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>Maybe this is beating a dead horse (please, no comments for animal
>rights activists), but I think there has to be a way to get formatted
>information from PDF out of PDF.
>
>Here's our problem. Our development department decided that they will
>produce PDF files as the output from our reporting tool. But, this
>presents the documentation team with a problem. How do we show these
>reports other than as screen captures (in which we would loose most of
>the columns)? In addition, we need to translate the headings (but not
>the data) into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese,
>Japanese, and Chinese. Scanning and OCR are not a viable solution since
>we are talking about multiple report examples in 45 English guides
>translated into at least six other languages.
>
>I tried a conversion tool that converted PDF into a WMF format (the eval
>copy of that software was unable to handle converting it into TIF which
>is what we usually filter our graphics into Interleaf). I then pasted
>the WMF pages of the report into a Word for Windows document, saved it
>as an RTF document, FTP'd the RTF document to my Interleaf desktop and
>filtered the document to Interleaf. Voila, the formatted reports were
>there, but the text appeared to be rasterized rather than coming in as
>text elements, which would make it difficult for our translation teams,
>who use IBM Translation Manager on OS/2 to automatically translate the
>bulk of our guides. WHEW!
>
>So, does anyone have any suggestions?
>
>We are pursuing another course internally to see if we can intercept the
>spool files as the reports are processed before going to PDF, but I hope
>there are alternatives that some of you might suggest as well.
>
>Thanks for your attention.
>
>
>Frank Tagader
>senior technical writer
>J.D. Edwards World Source Company
>303.488.1645
>frank_tagader -at- jdedwards -dot- com
>
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