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A
Anonymous
June 18, 2009
Question

Only have the pdf file

  • June 18, 2009
  • 1 reply
  • 874 views

I have recently inherited our companies tech writer position.  A task I have is to update a manual that had been created in FrameMaker.  However the only file that exists referring to this manual is the end product - pdf file.  Amazing but true.  I have searched everywhere available on the network.

Is there anyway to use the existing pdf file to "reverse engineer" this manual, by either importing or otherwise into FrameMaker?  It's almost 170 pages and I'm not anxious to try to recreate it from scratch.

TIA

Marty Rogers

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    A
    Art Campbell
    Inspiring
    June 18, 2009

    Open it in Acrobat (the full version, not Reader), and save as RTF.

    Then open the RTF file(s) in Frame.

    Acrobat is available as a 30-day eval from Adobe, if you don't have the full version.

    (There are a number of third-party tools that are supposed to extract RTF from PDFs too.)

    You're still going to have a lot of work to do because it'll come in without style information, but if you have any kind of a template you can apply, it should work out.

    Art

    A
    Anonymous
    June 18, 2009

    Art,

    Thanks for the response.  Well at least now I can open the file in FrameMaker.  But, it's a mess.  Looks like lots of sections of text overlaying one another.  I'll try to work on it from here.

    Thanks.

    A
    Art Campbell
    Inspiring
    June 18, 2009

    If you have another file or set of files that you can use as a template, a good way to clean out the mess and import new formats is the CleanImport plug-in.

    It will delete all styles in the catalogs of the old book, which you probably don't want, and import a clean set from your FM template.

    Art

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