[sac-forum] Re: Lunar 100 List

Yes, you're right again. My point is that the results are not consistent. Expecting that you can always take any PDF and save it back to another format without encountering any formatting anomaly may lead to some unpleasant surprises.
I'm using Acrobat 8 Pro and tried this workflow with the PDF in question, the Lunar 100 file. The original PDF was 579k and the exported Word (.doc) file was 869k. That's understandable and even tolerable. The formatting of the document, however, was drastically altered. When the new (.doc) file is opened in OpenOffice Write, it is unusable. When opened in MS Word 2003 it is improperly positioned on the page and has grown from 15 to 21 pages. Now, likely each one could be reworked into a usable document, but that seems like a lot of work. This whole process is still unreliable even when using the Enfocus PitStop Pro plug-ins.
Distilling native files into PDFs is, as you point out, is a much more consistent workflow.
Just as background to the conversation, I have worked in the printing/publishing industry for the past 25 years.
We seem to be drifting off-topic, so to get us back on let me comment on the front page story in today's Az Republic about the Phoenix Mars Mission. It's nice to see such an event get the ink it deserves. 

Peter

Richard Harshaw wrote:
If you have the distiller program (the one that CREATES PDF files), you can create a Word document with fields in it, such as text fields. These can then be tagged in the PDF as fields the user can actually type in, so if you have a PDF file on the screen and wanted to type data into, say, an observations notes field, you could do so. I've done this before for clients I have worked with and it works great! You have control over the layout of the form, but the user can add data as needed for his own purposes, within the constraints of the fields you define in the distilling process. 


Richard Harshaw

Cave Creek, AZ
*From:* sac-forum-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:sac-forum-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *Peter Argenziano 
*Sent:* Monday, May 19, 2008 10:49 AM
*To:* sac-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [sac-forum] Re: Lunar 100 List
While this is certainly true, most folks are likely to only have the free Reader application. The other caveat is that the results one gets using this action are inconsistent and depend in large part on the formatting in the original document. Another variable is the permissions the PDF was built with. 

Peter

Robert Parks wrote:
If you have the Adobe Acrobat Standard that reads and creates PDF files, it can save a PDF file to multiple formats including Word DOC's.

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