Converting a PDF back into Frame

Thank you all for your replies.

I do have the full version of Adobe as well as Solid PDF tools which does a great job converting PDF's to Word. I'll do that and format the Word file and import back into Frame and use the mapping table. It's not a big job. 

It's all good!

Thanks!

Sam 

Hi Sam,

That's exactly what I do, when I have to import a non-FrameMaker file.

Best regards, Winfried

Another issue that can arise in recovering text from old PDFs is special characters, and any non-Latin text. It might have been done using codepage/overlay fonts (rather than Unicode), and may extract as seemingly random glyphs.

If I ran into that, I'd be tempted to have Acrobat "sanitize" it (flatten it to raster), then OCR it, which would re-generate copyable text, as Unicode.

Hi Sam. There wouldn't be an off-the-shelf script to do this, but the FrameMaker cleanup could be partially automated with scripting. If you want information on specifics, please contact me offlist. Thanks.

What tools have you available?
Some PDF reader/editors can export the text to .doc, .rtf, and even .txt. The current Acrobat Pro has a variety of tools.

If there are images, are they vector or raster?
An old FM-authored doc with vector is apt to have been EPS. If you have a vector editor, such as Illustrator, you can decontruct the page, and save the vector object as SVG. Ditto for raster to PNG.

I haven't needed to do this in over decade, during which time the tools evolved.