(1) There are "a lot of people within Adobe" who
don't know what Dreamweaver or Contribute are either!
(2) Actually, there is NOT much demand for a PDF to
FrameMaker or even a PDF to InDesign "converter" at
least as expressed directly to Adobe. Most users of
these programs understand the problems of trying to
do such reverse engineering of a PDF file.
PDF is a "final form" document format. It does not have
the context of the graphical objects it represents.
At best, if you produce a "tagged" PDF, a "converter"
can make some guesses as to the original document
structure in terms of sentences, paragraphs, and tables,
but not much more. The Acrobat save-as-RTF capability
as well as the third party products out there try to
make good guesses as the original formatting, but that
is about the best they can do. Very little context of
a FrameMaker or InDesign document remains in the
resultant PDF file, so any attempt to go back to those
formats is somewhat doomed. If we were to supply "converters"
back to those formats, users expectations would be set
to a level that we could not deliver to.
Conversions from PDF should be viewed as and only be used
for emergency retrieval of content that has no other
means of being retrieved. We provide an RTF converter
simply because just about every text consuming program out
there can open or import content in RTF and that does satisfy
most of our customer's needs in terms of such emergency
retrieval.
- Dov
> -----Original Message-----
>
> I am sure there are a lot of people within Adobe that don't
> know what FrameMaker is.
>
> Rick Quatro
>
> > It always puzzles me how companies make decisions. Adobe has
included
> > a function within Acrobat to convert PDF to RTF, the file format of
> > their competitor, but not to FM which is one of their own file
> > formats. Perhaps there is not enough demand for PDF->FM?
> >
> > Diane
