Best practices when you need to source material from PDF

When pulling graphics from PDF:

If you just open a PDF in Illustrator, you may have dozens of clipping boxes. It can be a real mess, because bits and pieces of graphic can be bound together in clipping boxes.

But, aha - if you select your graphic in Acrobat, and right-click > edit in Illustrator, you get a much cleaner graphic.

Save that from AI to disk as .ai files, and you have a minimum of cleanup to do.

All this presumes, of course, that you have suitable versions of AI and Acrobat.

fwiw

Jay

Here is another convoluted approach to evade strange encodings and such.

From Acrobat, export the offending page as image.

Then create a new PDF from that image, and recognize text.

Export the result to Word.

<sigh>

I wonder how I could automate that?

In another discussion, there was talk of mapping/converting from one font to another.

I have a trial of PitStop Pro - it has some interesting functions, such as global font changes.

It sounds good, but in the doc I'm wrestling with, it could not cope with the strange encodings and couldn't convert the ligatures into the non-ligature equivalents in the desired font.

The "fi" ligature shows up everywhere, and PSP couldn't figure it out.

Also, Acrobat is unwilling/unable to search for that cnaracter/glyph in the PDF.

Oh, well - export to Word yielded valid text - kudos!

Copy and paste a chunk of text and see if it comes into InDesign with hard returns for the line breaks. If it does, add tags to the document. That will remove the hard returns.

There ate also a couple of good PDF to InDesign conversion tools. Those may help as well. it depends on how long the manual is and how exact you need it to be with regard to retaining the original layout.

When I’ve had to use PDFs as source material. I find it easiest just to copy and paste the text content into my InDesign template. Sometimes I’ll also open a PDF in Illuatrator to extract the graphics. If your graphics have missing fonts, you can place the PDF into Illustrator, then flatten transparency with all fonts set to outline and 100% vectors. Good luck!