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_Moore__Matt_Moore__
Participant
October 1, 2008
Question

Drag and drop images into anchored frames -- can this be done with the images imported by reference?

  • October 1, 2008
  • 3 replies
  • 268 views
My company bought a product from another company and the only manuals files that came with it were in pdf format. I am currently grabbing text out in Acrobat, then pasting and reformatting it in FrameMaker. Boring and tedious. . . .

Eventually I get to the point of importing the illustrations. There are *hundreds* of them. As a rule, we import the files by reference, to keep the chapter size smaller and to be able to double click the image to open it for modification.

However, I can drag an image file from the folder window and drop it into an anchored frame. Oooh, this is fast--way faster than all the mousework that goes into clicking file>import>file>[choosing the file then hitting the import button].

But, dang it, that copies the image into the FrameMaker file. No double-click opening. Giant fm. file size. Mad boss, shaking an SOP standards sheet in my face.

So, my question: Is there a way to import an image *by reference* by dragging and dropping them into an anchored frame?

Thanks, folks.

Moore. Matt Moore.
    This topic has been closed for replies.

    3 replies

    A
    Art Campbell
    Inspiring
    October 2, 2008
    Matt,
    I just got a semi-spam about a PDF extraction tool that has a free eval download... May be worth playing with if you think you'll need to do this again.

    http://www.investintech.com/prod_a2e.htm

    Art
    _
    _Moore__Matt_Moore__Author
    Participant
    October 1, 2008
    I tried the RTF route and, in addition to getting the body text I wanted, got paragraph after paragraph of the page numbers, the illustration text, the header and footer verbiage, all randomly placed between body text paragraphs.

    I did the same file twice, once by saving as RTF and deleting unwanted stuff, then repairing body paragraphs (each line of which is a seperate paragraph in the RTF file) and also by sweeping only the necessary text, then copying and pasting it page by page. The second method was a bit faster and less frustrating. Not to say that it isn't slow and frustrating in itself, but just a bit less. Less errors, too, with the second method.

    Bummer about importing by reference. I don't suppose there's a way to set up recorded actions with hotkeys, is there? Like in Illustrator?

    Thanks, Art.

    Moore. Matt Moore.
    A
    Art Campbell
    Inspiring
    October 1, 2008
    The short answer to your question, is "no," you can't drag and drop and import by reference in one pass.

    Also, it should be pointed out that you're kind of taking the long, painful approach to doing this....

    A better route would be to save the PDF file out as RTF and open that in Frame, and apply your own template. You can SaveAs either from Acrobat itself, or from any of several third-party extraction packages. You can also extract the graphics from the PDF as almost any graphics format, which would help importing them a bit, because you can do a File Import and point to a single directory containing all the files.

    Art
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