Best practices when you need to source material from PDF

Report · Oct 10, 2018

OK - Dov and Adobe thunder that Illustrator is not a general purpose PDF-editing tool.

We get that.

But, sometimes, I need to source material from PDF.

A former employee INSISTED on creating a manual in CorelDraw, we don't have that app and may not even have the source anyway. All we have is a PDF in dire need of help.

Let's presume we'll build the new doc in InDesign - there are enough changes that text and graphics will change, pagination will change, etc.;

What can we do from Acrobat DC, or perhaps Acrobat Pro DC, to prep a PDF for rebuild?

For some pages, a gentle massage in Acrobat will suffice - remove the old header and footer, and place that page in ID.

Other pages may need major overhaul of graphics, and may ned inline text & graphics - these things really call for graphics work in Illustrator and assembly in InDesign.

To start with, Acrobat (or only pro?) lets you convert color space to whatever you need.

What's next?

Report · Oct 13, 2018

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!

Report · Oct 26, 2018

"add tags" - I haven't tried that yet.

I did find that 'export to Word' has been improved a lot. And it even turns* 'stuff' with bad encodings and ligatures into straight editable text in Word.

* well - at least, in some cases. Absolutely no guarantees!

So, that's another way to do cleanup - effectively the best OCR that Adobe can do, piped into an editor that knows spell checking, formatting, etc.

Use Acrobat to clean most of the extra crap, like headers/footers out. Then export to Word.

Still a series of kludges, but that's what you have when pulling content from PDFs.

Report · Oct 26, 2018

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!

Report · Nov 08, 2018

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?

Report · Feb 05, 2019

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