About Justin VanAlstyne Expertise I have a full working knowledge of Adobe Acrobat 5.0 - 7.01. I have experience in creating interactive PDFs, embedding multimedia, web-based forms, creating presentations using PDF, advanced prepress preparation, PDF web optimization, color management, and using PDF as a soft-proofing tool. I do not have a lot of experience using Acrobat`s advanced Javascripting features, though a lot of custom functionality can be built into a PDF this way.
Experience
Past/Present clients Marsh, Inc. (http://www.marsh.com), Impel Corp (http://www.impelcorp.com), Home Properties (http://www.homeproperties.com)
Expert: Justin VanAlstyne Date: 10/23/2004 Subject: PDF Conversion to Word or Whatever
Question Justin:
This is basically a follow-on to a previous question.
My requirement is as follows;
I would like to extract segments of a PDF file and use them to creat brochures or flyers or web pages.
I attempted to address that requirement with Acrobat 5 but the reults were poor (or I was inept).
I started to look at PDF Converter 2 by Scansoft, but the user comments on the Amazon.com site were very negative.
In your opinion, can you recommend any software that will do a good job in this area.
Is an upgrade to Acrobat 6 the logical answer, or is there a product on the market that addresses this need better.
I welcome your opinion.
Thanks
Nick M.
Answer Nick-
It's not going to be easy or pretty. The problem is that your dealing with the absolute end product in the build process of that document. It's like taking a nice high-res photograph, scaling it and compressing it for the web, losing the original, and having to work magic to get it back to the original state.
I'm not sure that any software is going to get your where you need to go. Acrobat already has built-in features to export the text in the document as HTML, Word Doc, or text file.
Removing graphics from the PDF is usually not a gloriously successful task. Your best bet, as I may have mentioned before, is opening the PDF in Photoshop and Illustrator to grab what graphics you need. Keep in mind that the graphics in your PDF are probably already compressed to a lower resolution than the original graphic. So reusing them may show visual artifacts from multiple JPEG saves.
Once you get your graphics together, you can begin to to re-layout the text (I don't believe any plugin or software will do this accurately and cleanly, so save your money anddo it yourself) in your page layout program. If your document text was laid out in a multiple column format, you have may have alot of work on your hands.
