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)
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Followup To
Question -
I bought a technical book that had a CD-ROM included as a bonus. There are a bunch of files in .pdf format on the disk. They are all formatted differently, some are like Word documents and others are like drawings. I have Adobe Acrobat available at work, can you tell me the process for converting these into something useful for myself? For the items that are like big "A3" items that look almost scanned what can I do with those?
Answer -
David-
I may be able to help you, but I'm not sure what you consider "useful" for you. What are you looking to do with the PDFs beyond how they are now?
The scanned documents that are just basically images of the pages... you pretty much out of luck in doing much with them. There are methods you can use to get Acrobat to try and OCR (interpret the text) the text portions. But if the files are just for occaisional reference, I wouldn't waste any time doing much with them. Just view them when you need them on your computer, or print out a few pages here and there.
- Justin
What I have are documents that would be great to use in Word or Excel instead of trying to recreate them all by hand. Frankly, I'm not sure why they even bothered putting these in with the book if they are all PDF since you have to go through so many hoops to use them. But if a file looks like a Word or Excel file what's the process to get them into that format again, and can I maintain the formatting when I do that?
- David
Answer David-
The PDFs that contain actual text maybe of some use to you. You can use the "Save As.." option to have Acrobat save the PDF to a number of different file types. You could select Word document, HTML, etc. as a way to get the text out of the file. Formatting is attempted to be duplicated, but it often requires fixing. Tables are another story, I don't have much experience in attempting to have Acrobat recreate tables so I can't attest to it's accuracy in that regard. My guess is that it won't do an overly good job, if it does it at all.
The scanned pages are probably a lost cause. You can try using the "Paper Capture" function (see Acrobat's help for more info about this), but depending upon the quality of the scan and the type of document, this could prove useless.
Good luck, let me know if you have any more questions,
- Justin
