importing a .pdf into a .rtf?

[dpang]

Hi, I'm in the final stages of writing my PhD thesis and have been trying unsuccessfully to import a .pdf document into my .rtf document as an appendix. Is this possible?

[mrennie]

You can't import a PDF file into Nisus Writer Pro and then edit its content. I would recommend that once you are done writing, you save your thesis as a PDF file and then use a PDF tool, such as Preview in Leopard and Snow Leopard, or Acrobat Pro, to add the appendix file to it and create a master PDF file.

[Hamid]

Hi, I'm in the final stages of writing my PhD thesis and have been trying unsuccessfully to import a .pdf document into my .rtf document as an appendix. Is this possible?

If the appendix is a few pages, you can save each page as a separate pdf file; then you can import one page at a time (separated by a Return) as you would import an image from the Insert menu.

[martin]

Hamid and mrennie are both correct: Nisus Writer won't extract the textual content from your PDF file. But as they've suggested, you might stitch together two final PDFs, or insert each page of the appendix as an image.

Another possible workaround: open the PDF in a PDF viewer (eg: Preview, Acrobat, etc), select all the text, copy, switch to Nisus Writer, and finally paste. That may or may not result in pretty/manageable results. PDF is designed primarily as a presentation format, ie: that everything appear exactly the same on all computers. It's main goal wasn't editable/reflowable text.

[dpang]

Thanks for all your suggestions. I ended up splitting the paper into single pdfs (using PDFLab) and inserting each one as an image file to form an appendix. Didn't take too long with only 6 pages.

[Juddbert]

You can't import a PDF file into Nisus Writer Pro and then edit its content. I would recommend that once you are done writing, you save your thesis as a PDF file and then use a PDF tool, such as Preview in Leopard and Snow Leopard, or Acrobat Pro, to add the appendix file to it and create a master PDF file.

That's not strictly true: Automator provides a Drag & Drop solution. Create a folder, then select <Folder Action> in Automator. Nominate your new folder, then drag in <Extract PDF Text> and select <Rich Text> in Output. Now all you need to do is drag your PDF to the folder and Automator gets busy. The resulting RTF file may require a little formatting, but essentially all the hard work is done.

[martin]

Interesting.. thanks for the tip!

[greenmorpher]

Hiya juddbert

That's interesting. I've never had an y joy with Automator -- I just don't grok the interface. I'll try gain, though. I use File Juicer.app to take PDFs (and any other format I've tried) apart. it stores the text as text and RTF in separate folders, and the different kinds of graphics in separate folders. Very handy.

Cheers

Geoffrey Heard
Business writer, editor, publisher
The Worsley Press
Buy "Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes?" -- the world's ONLY scientifically based guide to type and layout, and receive a free 140 page guide to advertising for small business: "How to make great ads for (small) business: 99 real world advertising ideas to kickstart *your* business today". Amazon or http://www.worsleypress.com

[Groucho]

The biggest issue with extracting text out of a pdf is reflowing. Preview for Snow Leopard goes a long way toward reflowing text and recreating paragraphs. But you can’t rely on it freely. You will still need some polishing, mostly when the text is not justified. You can see something is going wrong when you find lines ending with commas, or colons, or when you find lines beginning with lowercase characters. I use this Find/Replace whatchamacallit when I want to clean up a text from a pdf:

Code: Select all

Find what: (?<=[a-z,;])\n|\n(?=[a-z])
Replace with: [space]

Click on the Replace with box and hit the spacebar once. Select PowerFind Pro from the Using dropdown. Uncheck Ignore Case.

Lemmeknow, Henry

[Jester]

You can't import a PDF file into Nisus Writer Pro and then edit its content. I would recommend that once you are done writing, you save your thesis as a PDF file and then use a PDF tool, such as Preview in Leopard and Snow Leopard, or Acrobat Pro, to add the appendix file to it and create a master PDF file.

That's not strictly true: Automator provides a Drag & Drop solution. Create a folder, then select <Folder Action> in Automator. Nominate your new folder, then drag in <Extract PDF Text> and select <Rich Text> in Output. Now all you need to do is drag your PDF to the folder and Automator gets busy. The resulting RTF file may require a little formatting, but essentially all the hard work is done.

Nice, thanks a lot! I guess I should be using Automator a lot more….

You can also use a program called PDFPen; I've used it to convert PDFs to text and worked wonderfully! I'd say it's even better than Acrobat, it has a much simpler user interface.

[craigminah]

I wanted to convert some PDFs to ePubs so I tried out AnyBizSoft Pdf Converter (http://anybizsoft.net/). It does a great job and also converts from PDF to Word. I've only found one file it choked on.