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Known Participant
June 27, 2014
Answered

What is the easiest way to PDF just one file

  • June 27, 2014
  • 2 replies
  • 405 views

I am working in FM11 and found my 494 pg PDF has 3 pages that needed replacing. I made the fix in FM and wanted to PDF just the chapter with the updated pages and drag them into the original PDF. Thanks.

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    Correct answer Bob_Niland

    If you have the full Acrobat product, you can insert pages from one PDF to another, but the resulting PDF may have broken cross-references and hypertext.

    I routinely do such page insertions and replacements when cleaning up old paper-only manuals being scanned to PDF with OCR.

    I would never do it with a generated PDF manual, even if the re-rendering took hours.

    2 replies

    Arnis Gubins
    Inspiring
    June 30, 2014

    In Acrobat, when you "replace" a page, Acrobat just slides the text content (i.e. the visible portion of the page) in under the layer containing the links. If you haven't added new links or destinations, or caused the existing ones to move around on the page, on those "fixed" pages, then you should be good to go.

    Otherwise, with more extensive edits that involve x-refs and links, it's safer to re-generate the PDF, as Error recommends.

    Bob_Niland
    Community Expert
    Bob_NilandCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
    Community Expert
    June 28, 2014

    If you have the full Acrobat product, you can insert pages from one PDF to another, but the resulting PDF may have broken cross-references and hypertext.

    I routinely do such page insertions and replacements when cleaning up old paper-only manuals being scanned to PDF with OCR.

    I would never do it with a generated PDF manual, even if the re-rendering took hours.

    FMdancerAuthor
    Known Participant
    June 30, 2014

    Thanks for the feedback. Good point about the links, I wasn't thinking about that. One of my problems with the PDF that FM created was it made my diagonal red page border come out as a solid red border. It is a requirement that the book have this diagonal. My FM master page shows it correctly and if I print a page from the FM file it prints correctly. I need to know how to make the PDF show the page border correctly. With Microsoft Word, sometimes if I print just the section that has a special border and replace the page in the PDF, all is well. But in this case, I also need the links to work.

    Arnis Gubins
    Inspiring
    June 30, 2014

    You can also use Acrobat's Watermark or Page background features to add a PDF of such a border layout that is placed behind or on top of the current page with user-defined transparency levels. This way you don't have to make any chnges in FM, but it can be a mantenance issue, as you have to remember to do it every time you create the PDF.

    FM's line patterns don't always match what you see (the postscript code is interpreted before output and some results are hard-wired). The best approach is to create the diagonal-lined border in a program such as Illustrator, verify that it looks correct in a PDF output and save it as an EPS. Then place the EPS as the background on your Master page. FM will pass the EPS code straight through and not try to interpret it.