Import PDF

Report · Jul 27, 2009

I'm trying to decide whether FrameMaker is the righ tool for a project:

I need to build technical documents based on importing existing PDF files created by a legacy publishing system.

Each book conts approximate 15000 pages.

The PDF contains clean text and some artwork (mostly vector base but also some raster), and is NOT based on scanning and OCR.

The resulting books need to be editable in FrameMaker, although I wouldn't expect FrameMaker to discover structure.

Is this doable in FrameMaker?

Is FrameMaker the right application for this?

Are there existing FrameMaker plugins that would help?

Report · Jul 27, 2009

From the kinda sketchy information you provided, there's no reason Frame shouldn't be able to handle this project with aplomb.

It sounds as if you want a publishing tool that will basically provide containers for the PDFs, and Frame can do that. As you plan the setup, make sure that you play to Frame's strengths -- it is designed to handle a book or nested books, each containing multiple files and those files would be your PDF containers. One file with 15,000 pages wouldn't be a good idea. Break it into small chunks.

Because renedering lots of graphics in a project like this is compute intensive, I'd plan on a fast network and workstation class computers with lots of RAM and disk space for temp files.

Art

Report · Jul 27, 2009

If you are expecting FrameMaker or any other DTP program to provide editing of the original pdf files and/or its content then it is a no go. If you want as Art says to treat the Frame page as a container; in other words treat each pdf file as a single graphic, then Frame can do that.

I think if you are moving a legacy system to PDFs into a DTP program that is probably the wrong way to do unless you plan to set things up as a structured document so that the end result will be an xml or sgml file. However, to discuss this more sensibly we need to know exactly what you are planning on doing with the end product.

Report · Jul 27, 2009

Let me clarify a little: I need to rip off the PDF envelope and extract the text and graphics

so that the text is editable, such as inserting and/or deleting lines of text.

In order to accomplish this I would expect the operator to have to define the structure of the edited and seeceding pages,

so that text can flow from one page to the other.

I dont think using FrameMaker as a container for a PDF object will do the trick

Report · Jul 27, 2009

OK, that's a totally different workflow. You have two issues, conversion and document management. FM would not have a problem with the document management -- that's what it was designed to do and excels at.

On the translation side, you need to save the PDFs out as .RTF files. You can do that with Acrobat and any number of third party tools. Given the number of files you have, I'd look into whether Acrobat Server could batch the files for you. (An option may be further ahead if you can get the legacy system files and convert those, but that may be a long shot.)

Then you can use Frame to open and edit the RTFs and organize the component files in books.

At that point, you'd need to impose some kind of template on the component files... which Frame can handle very niicely.