Lars Nooden [mailto:[email protected]] suggested:
> On 4/7/10 1:25 PM, Harold Fuchs wrote: > > ...In either case, converting the PDF to > > an editable format seems to me to be quite a legitimate requirement. > > Only until the format is understood, after that, no. The > purpose of PDF > is for display, not editing. If you want to edit the > document, keep the > original. If you don't have it, contact the author and > request a copy. > > Formats are tools and like with any tool set there is the matter of > choosing the right tool for the job. > > The nature of a PDF is that it probably does not contain > anything that > you can still edit. In many cases, the even the glyphs are > converted to > outlines so even the text is gone. > > If you don't have the file that was used to create the PDF, > then it is > necessary to face the fact that the original is gone. OOo > does a great > job of exporting to PDF, but you have to keep the original > around if you > wish to continue editing. Lars, My crystal ball says that you've never worked for a company that has bought/merged another company. It's common for companies to have repositories of released documents - as PDF or however they are distributed to customers and the public. It's also common to have the original source documents in the possession of the techwriters who created them. They might be lovingly backed up to portable media, or even to company servers, and the locations of the source files (and their backups) are known to the writer and to his/her manager[s]. Then the smaller company gets bought. Certain people are offered positions with the new-owner company... others are let go, offices are closed or moved, say from Australia to the USA. Months later (perhaps longer), after the amalgamation and streamlining, it's time to make a new release of some of the products of the former smaller company. The source code and the hardware designs are all available to the engineers. The assigned techwriter has... wait for it... wait for it... nothing but a mess of PDFs. Nobody can find the source docs. The former writers are long gone, perhaps living in the streets and unreachable. The former manager is now clawing his way up some other corporate employer hierarchy or has taken his severance package to start an emu ranch, and is equally unavailable... even if he could remember where to look for his former minions' backup files on servers that have been de-commissioned. PDF it is then. Dozens of them. No source text. No source drawings or screen-caps or photos. Everybody who's a middle-to-senior exec knows that if you've got the docs (the PDFs in the released-product repository), you've got the docs, and some grunt-labor techwriter will handle the details. Or they'll just rewrite 'em from scratch. It's not hard or time-consuming to write multi-hundred-page reference and toolkit manuals if you've got the product, is it? Piece of cake! Been there. Done that. By the third time, I was being proactive and begging to have the source files secured as an early step in the amalgamation - but it's still hard to train executives in some other country when they are dealing with big legal and fiscal issues of acquiring an entire company from a third country. Also, when a multi-division company is being acquired by another multi-division company, it is not always clear until well into the process which of the acquired divisions will be merged into which of the acquiring company's divisions... or just sold off. All of that to say, you have to know where the source files are, what they were called, how they were organized, and you have to have a way to contact the original authors, sometimes beyond the grave. Quite often, not possible. It's not like in government or some rarified areas of academia. By the way, aren't there signs - in recent versions of Acrobat Pro and other offerings - that Adobe is beginning to tackle the routine editing of PDFs? Cheers, - Kevin (in Canada, eh?) The information contained in this electronic mail transmission may be privileged and confidential, and therefore, protected from disclosure. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and deleting it from your computer without copying or disclosing it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
