PDF exploder??

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I have a client who gets many catalogues from suppliers he purchases from in Europe. My need was to “Australianise” these catalogues by pulling them apart, removing any non English text then recreating them using his name and logo and the English words (possibly modified a little ) and (numerous) tables of specifications from the original suppliers PDF files (BTW the Suppliers are quite happy with this as he is their agent in Oz). Dutifully went out and spent a fortune buying Adobe Writer v 6 only to find that while it will create wonderful PDF files from Word or Web sites (does a great job on those), I have very little control on changing things within the PDF file. Exporting to Word to make changes screws up most of the tables and basically I am getting a headache from bashing my head against a brick wall. I have tried all sorts of arcane approaches right down to manually copying the tables to Corel then bringing them into word then to Adobe. Both painful and impractical for catalogues that can be 1,000 pages long . Any suggestions ??
Steve

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Ask the suppliers if they are willing to provide the original files the PDF’s were created from.

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Tried that but with little success – most have these catalogues produced by outside companies and they are releuctant to give me source files without lotsa money changing hands
Thanks again Hans- (when do you ever sleep)
Steve

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Tried that but with little success – most have these catalogues produced by outside companies and they are releuctant to give me source files without lotsa money changing hands
Thanks again Hans- (when do you ever sleep)
Steve

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Ask the suppliers if they are willing to provide the original files the PDF’s were created from.

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PDF is intended to be a distribution format created from docs created in other apps.

There are 3rd parties that specialize in PDF, but having read the PDF specs, I’d say that it would be ratyher difficult to modify PDF directly, instead you need the source app.
You might try checking at

http://www.planetpdf.com/%5B/url%5D
http://www.pdflib.com/%5B/url%5D
http://www.pdfzone.com/%5B/url%5D

But, and I do have a big butt, the place to start is the newsgroup comp.text.pdf and the Acrobat/PDF forums at Adobe’s web site.

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PDF is intended to be a distribution format created from docs created in other apps.

There are 3rd parties that specialize in PDF, but having read the PDF specs, I’d say that it would be ratyher difficult to modify PDF directly, instead you need the source app.
You might try checking at

http://www.planetpdf.com/%5B/url%5D
http://www.pdflib.com/%5B/url%5D
http://www.pdfzone.com/%5B/url%5D

But, and I do have a big butt, the place to start is the newsgroup comp.text.pdf and the Acrobat/PDF forums at Adobe’s web site.

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You could try going down the OCR route, but you will probably need an almost superhuman degree of patience if you’re trying to modify the resulting output which the OCR mechanism has attempted to turn into Text Boxes in Word .RTF format (say), together with Graphics. It’s the sort of thing you could do given a few lifetimes.

I suppose it is possible that someone actually makes a living doing this!

But a niggling fear keeps coming back to my head — what do you do when the original PDF files get changed, as they are bound to do (at indeterminate but apparently frequent intervals)? How do you cope with what is the equivalent of reverse engineering a huge document where you have to determine yourself what the changes have been?

I would suggest you have got to be on a loser with this one. Converting an ordinary printed book (no piccies, no tables, regular text in no more than a couple of fonts) might be practical. A catalogue? Give me 1.3 megaquid, and I might be interested…!

Get the original supplier to change his contract with the people who design the catalogues, such that the designers always have to return to the supplier the catalogue in editable format. Then you can Ozzyize it by inserting as many Bruces and Sheilas as your heart desires! (Acknowledgements to Monty Python).

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John,

Haven’t noticed you on the Lounge for a while. Was going to send out the search parties to see where you went off to?

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I must be the scarlet pumpernickel…! It’s nice to know I was missed — but for what reasons??!

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Just conspicuous by your absence, John.

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Just conspicuous by your absence, John.

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I must be the scarlet pumpernickel…! It’s nice to know I was missed — but for what reasons??!

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John,

Haven’t noticed you on the Lounge for a while. Was going to send out the search parties to see where you went off to?

Reply | Quote

You could try going down the OCR route, but you will probably need an almost superhuman degree of patience if you’re trying to modify the resulting output which the OCR mechanism has attempted to turn into Text Boxes in Word .RTF format (say), together with Graphics. It’s the sort of thing you could do given a few lifetimes.

I suppose it is possible that someone actually makes a living doing this!

But a niggling fear keeps coming back to my head — what do you do when the original PDF files get changed, as they are bound to do (at indeterminate but apparently frequent intervals)? How do you cope with what is the equivalent of reverse engineering a huge document where you have to determine yourself what the changes have been?

I would suggest you have got to be on a loser with this one. Converting an ordinary printed book (no piccies, no tables, regular text in no more than a couple of fonts) might be practical. A catalogue? Give me 1.3 megaquid, and I might be interested…!

Get the original supplier to change his contract with the people who design the catalogues, such that the designers always have to return to the supplier the catalogue in editable format. Then you can Ozzyize it by inserting as many Bruces and Sheilas as your heart desires! (Acknowledgements to Monty Python).

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