Graphics in FM

[Fred Ridder]

Art Campbell wrote:
 
> You can delete lines and words with Acrobat and keep it in PDF format.
 
Unfortunately, this is frequently not the case for drawings that originate
in a CAD application. In nearly all cases, text is not comprised of font
glyphs, but is actually drawn with lots of tiny curves. Similarly, what 
we percieve as a line or some other geometric primitive is often built
up from dozens (or hundreds) of smaller line and curve segments. And to
make matters worse, most CAD tools create arbitrary object groups that
contain hundreds (even thousands) of tiny curves, not all of which are 
components of logically related drawing objects. I've had to deal with 
PDFs from CAD tools at four different companies, and there have always
been issues. In trying to select all of the lines that make up the letters 
in some text, it often happens that you also select (and potentially 
delete) parts of objects that you need to keep. And even opening it
in Illustrator is only a partial solution becase some of the grouped 
objects are so complex that Illustrator chokes when trying to ungroup 
them.
 
But Acrobat does provide the opportunity to hide objects by drawing 
white shaped over them and then outputting a new "refried" PDF. I
know there can be some techincal issues with this approach, but it
has saved my bacon more than a few times.
 
Fred Ridder