> He wants a solution that bypasses the need for FrameMaker, and has
read an article that says Word 2013 will allow editing of PDFs in native
format. He wants the developers to be able to do this to my docs.
>
Ignoring the fact that Microsoft is famous for talking about features in
future products that never actually make it into the release, or that
possible release dates are rarely met, doesn't your QA guy realize that
PDFs don't store information the same way as normal documents? They
don't necessarily store paragraphs as paragraphs or even store words as
words-- but may store them as separate groupings of letters. And
elements on the PDF page aren't necessarily generated in the order you
expect. (See page 25 of the PDF at this link:
http://www.planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/pdf2k/02E/gstaas_howpdfworks.pdf.)
(I've seen a better explanation of this somewhere, but couldn't find it.)
So any program that reads a PDF takes its best guess in reconstituting
text back into words and paragraphs. In other words, what you see in the
PDF may not be what you get in the converted Word doc, nor in the
regenerated PDF. I found this description of the Word 2013 PDF editing
feature to back that up:
----
With Word 2013, you can convert a PDF document into a Word document and
edit the content.
To convert a PDF, you open it like you would any other document.
1. Click *File* > *Open* > *Browse*.
2. Find the PDF and click *Open*.
The converted document might not have a perfect page to page
correspondence with the original. The conversion works best with mostly
textual documents.
----
Notice that last part. "The converted document might not have a perfect
page to page correspondence with the original. The conversion works best
with mostly textual documents." In other words, prepare for problems.
Expect to lose your previous formatting. Unless you are editing simple
business letters or novels, problems are pretty much guaranteed. (Here's
the link:
http://www.liveside.net/2012/06/29/exclusive-microsoft-word-2013-to-support-built-in-pdf-editing/.)
PDFs are meant to be final output only. To fix typos in a PDF, the
standard procedure is to fix the source file and regenerate a corrected
PDF. (If you don't fix the source, the typo just reappears the next time
an updated PDF is generated.)
Mike Wickham
<http://www.liveside.net/2012/06/29/exclusive-microsoft-word-2013-to-support-built-in-pdf-editing/>
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