PDF Opens One Page Only

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levelbest
Posts: 21
Joined: 2018-04-04 06:29:10

PDF Opens One Page Only

Post by levelbest »

My access Adobe Acrobat just died. R.I.P. to a very useful bit of software. I refuse to use a subscription model going forward and Adobe requires this so, I am now having to see what else works. I am editing a 27 page PDF document right now. I can open it with Nisus v3 but ... it will only open it as though it was just a one page document. It opens the first page very quickly and well formatted. But, no other pages are opened or even referenced.

I have a similar version of this same file from a month ago that I (probably) ran the Adobe Acrobat optimize scanned feature on and, that opens in Nisus showing all the pages. What is up with this new version of Nisus not being able to open a 27 page PDF document (well, the first page only)?

Is the problem with the new Nisus filters to do this? Is the problem with the previously optimized post scan software task that I can no longer do without resubscribing to Adobe?

Can anyone answer this please?
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martin
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Re: PDF Opens One Page Only

Post by martin »

Nisus Writer can extract full editable text from PDFs, but it depends on how the PDF file was created. If Nisus Writer is unable to extract text from a PDF then it will fallback to inserting the first page of the PDF as an image. This is likely the behavior you're observing.

However, to be absolutely sure you might send us the PDF in question and we'd be happy to have a look. It's best to send us materials using the menu Help > Send Feedback, but you can email us instead if you prefer:
Image
levelbest
Posts: 21
Joined: 2018-04-04 06:29:10

Re: PDF Opens One Page Only

Post by levelbest »

Thanks. I will have to look around for something to test and send out to you. The document I am working on has too much sensitive information in it to feel comfortable sharing it. I have a ScanSnap scanner. When I scan in a document it becomes a PDF. Editing the PDF is the problem I am speaking of. Acrobat was useful as it allowed me to "render" or "optimize" the text in the PDF. Only then could I actually edit my PDFs. Now that I cannot use Acrobat, I can no longer "optimize" or "render" my PDFs. I am guessing it is either that I still need to be able to "render" or "optimize" the scanned text before Nisus can comprehend it, or that the 3.0 Nisus filters are not working quite right. I appreciate your testing this -when I get something I can scan to send out. I will though. Again, thank you.
Roger
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Joined: 2017-01-03 16:43:39

Re: PDF Opens One Page Only

Post by Roger »

It sounds to me like you need to activate the OCR feature (optical character recognition) of the ScanSnap software.

https://www.scansnapworld.com/scansnapw ... p-scanner/
Vanceone
Posts: 211
Joined: 2013-05-03 07:06:31

Re: PDF Opens One Page Only

Post by Vanceone »

As a (vaguely) related question: Is there an easy way to add all pages of a PDF to a Nisus document? I frequently have to attach copies of a PDF document as part of an appendix, for instance. Right now I have to laboriously copy each page, one at a time, in Preview and then paste it into my Nisus document, and frequently I get a shortcut link instead of the page. Is there a simpler way to do this? I would love to be able to select a series of pages out of a larger PDF in Preview, for instance, and paste them all at once; or just insert a PDF document, one PDF page to one Nisus page. Just joining a PDF output of Nisus to the PDF won't work, as i need the page numbering and perhaps table of contents links as well.
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phspaelti
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Location: Japan

Re: PDF Opens One Page Only

Post by phspaelti »

Hello Vance, if you want to insert single pages of a pdf into a Nisus document, you could use the following procedure. First extract the page images from the pdf into a folder. (I use a program like Graphic Converter for this). Then you can use a macro like this to insert them into the Nisus document.

Code: Select all

$pages = Choose Files
foreach $page in $pages
$img = Image.newFromFileAtPath $page
Select Document End
Image.insertInlineImage $img
end
philip
adryan
Posts: 561
Joined: 2014-02-08 12:57:03
Location: Australia

Re: PDF Opens One Page Only

Post by adryan »

G’day, Philip, Vanceone et al

Opening a PDF document in NWP loses much formatting. AppleScript doesn’t even understand page numbers when it comes to Preview. But an approach which seems to work goes as follows:–

(1) Create a Workflow in Automator with these two Actions: “Get Selected Finder Items”, “Split PDF”.
(2) Select your original PDF file in the Finder.
(3) Run the Automator Workflow. All the pages of your original PDF document now appear as separate files in the Output destination you specified in the “Split PDF” Action in Automator.
(4) In a NWP document, position the insertion point at the top of (the body of) a page. (Actually, this step may not always be necessary.)
(5) Insert > Image…
(6) In the dialog box that opens, navigate to your PDF document page files, then select the one(s) you want. You can select multiple files, non-contiguously if you wish.
(7) Click on the Open button, et voilà!

All of this could probably be packaged into a single script of some sort, using a combination of Automator, AppleScript and Nisus macros. (Philip’s posting shows how the macro language might be used in this context.) In any case, save the Automator Workflow for future use, perhaps as a standalone application if you wish.

If page numbers are embedded as visible entities in the original PDF pages, they may conflict with those in your Nisus document. You could overwrite them with a suitably colored rectangle, either using Preview’s Markup capability or NWP’s Shape feature.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,
Adrian
MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, 2021)
macOS Ventura
Nisus Writer user since 1996
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martin
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Re: PDF Opens One Page Only

Post by martin »

Nisus Writer Pro version 3.2 adds a feature that makes this PDF insertion process easier. If you use the menu Insert > Image > Insert Image to insert a PDF into your document, you will be asked how you would like to proceed. Nisus Writer will offer you the following choices:

pdf.png
pdf.png (80.26 KiB) Viewed 8356 times

You can see that you can insert the PDF as images or text. The latter can either load the text encoded in the PDF, or use optical character recognition (OCR) to scan the image for text. The OCR process relies upon macOS, so Catalina or later is required. The quality of the OCR scan will vary depending on your document and system version.

For more details please see the section Import a PDF from the user guide.
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