[OT] Adobe Acrobat question

[James McMurray]

I have Adobe Acrobat 5.0 and have recently downloaded a demo of a plug-in that supposedly allows conversion of pdfs to rtf and doc format. However, for some reason I don't have a plug-in menu on my toolbar. The documentation for Acrobat and the demo both say there should be one...

Anyone out there have any ideas?

 

[Mark]

Be sure it is located correctly and try a reboot of your system, maybe? *shrug*

 

[jaerdaph]

Do you have the full blown Adobe Acrobat, or just the free Acrobat Reader? Plug-ins might not work with the free reader.

If you do have the full blown Acrobat, plug-ins should appear by name on the Tools pull down menu. There isn't a seperate plug-ins pull down menu anymore (I think. Now I can't remember if previous versions had one or not).

Anyhow, according to the Acrobat documentation, a plug-in must be located in the Acrobat Plug_ins folder to load with Acrobat. On my system (Windows), this is the path:

Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat5.0\Acrobat\Plug_ins

EDIT: Each third party plug-in has its own directory (folder) within the Plug_ins folder.

I hope this helps.

 

[James McMurray]

I do have the full Adobe Acrobat, but for some reason neither of the two demos I've gotten from BCL show up on my tolls menu. They are in the plugins folder though.

Ah well.

Anyone know of a good pdf extraction program? I wantt o edit some pdfs but the text touchup tool is waaay too slow. And with the way the documents (ESDs) are set up, if the text changes too much, you end up having to overwrite things to make it fit.

 

[Grazzt]

I do have the full Adobe Acrobat, but for some reason neither of the two demos I've gotten from BCL show up on my tolls menu. They are in the plugins folder though.

Ah well.

Anyone know of a good pdf extraction program? I wantt o edit some pdfs but the text touchup tool is waaay too slow. And with the way the documents (ESDs) are set up, if the text changes too much, you end up having to overwrite things to make it fit.

Adobe has a converter on their site somewhere. Just not sure where. It works pretty well. If I can find the link I will post it here, otherwise just hit www.adobe.com.

 

[James McMurray]

I do have Adobe's "save as rtf" plug-in, but it doesn't work well at all on the document I'm trying to convert (the Battlesystem ESD). The pdf has multiple columns and rows on each page, and the converter just dumps everything into a single column, ruining the flow of the document.

 

[maransreth]

Use Acrobat itself

Acrobat 5, not 4, has the function to save as rtf inbuilt into it immediately. However if you have a pdf with pictures in it, it is hard to save as a rtf. Only very rarely have I got it to work and then it was only with a page with text.
The other way to do it, is next to the hand icon in the toolbar, there is a button with T and a box in it or part of the icon, click on that and you can select text in the pdf. Then go to Edit ->Copy and then Paste it into a word document.
If this button does not allow you to do this, the page was not converted correctly into a pdf.
My university uses pdfs alot and it makes it easier to select the text from the pdf they provide and then edit it in Word. However some of the lecturers do not convert from the original text correctly and this way of doing it doesn't work then.

 

[James McMurray]

Trying that with large chunks of text also has the effect of removing column and table formatting.

The plug-in demo I got said it near perfectly exported text and formatting, but the stinkin' thing won't work!