Is it possible to import and edit PDF files?

[tanker0001]

I work in a technical publication department as a system admin.  A case has come up where a customer is going to take over the authoring of their own manuals.  Giving the current authoring systems incompatibility (Legacy XPP) with the destination authoring system (Customer uses FrameMaker) I need to ask the subject question.  I don't know anything about FrameMaker.  However, we regularly generate PDFs and make extensive use of Acrobat Pro.  I'm looking for a transition path and I'm thinking that since PDF is a creation of Adobe, I'm wondering if FrameMaker can import and edit PDF files.  As I said, I know nothing about FrameMaker so I may be WAY off.  I've done a bit of searching in this forum and perused the programs features but I only found information for creating PDFs.

Thanks in advance,

Stan

[Matt S - Tech Comm Tools]

You can save your PDFs as RTF or Word, but you'll likely have better luck importing the source files from which the PDFs were created.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

FM can import PDFs, but it doesn't edit them - it creates them as one form of output. FM is an authoring system specializing in long document management - it came out of the book publishing industry. If your customer is taking over their own authoring, and is going to use FM, what form is the content in currently? (I didn't recognize "Legacy XPP" as a system). As Matt says, it would be better to export out of that, but if PDF is the only starting point that can work, then going via RTF/Word and into FM would be the best way. There still will be clean-up of the content required in any case.

[tanker0001]

Thanks for the quick replies.

XPP is XML Professional Publisher, previously known as XYVision. My department has used it longer than the 20+ years I've been here.  While XPP will do XML, the TREMENDOUS amount of data that exists in the legacy format has made it cost prohibitive to convert.  Since the file formats are proprietary (can only be opened in XPP) the only way to import the data to FM is to first export it to ASCII.

Thanks for the input.  It seems the only transition (so far) is the Word/RTF method or the rough road of importing ACSII.

Thanks, Stan.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

If you can export XML or SGML out of XPP, they should be able to import it into Structured FrameMaker (probably with some assistance). That might be an option...

[Matt S - Tech Comm Tools]

Have you reached out to SDL to discuss options? IIRC they acquired the product