Automating the import of multi-page PDFs

[Chris Seal]

Wow. Quick response!
I've read the responses, and obviously I have to clarify a few things.

Note: This is a short contract in which I have already finished several
collections that were started by others, and in which the FM book had been
set up, and individual documents had been text filled and partially
formatted. I now have to start on the next and final collection from
scratch, and that is why I am investigating other methods. It seems to me
that the previous writers had copied text from the WP original and pasted it
into the FM document. The clue is that sometimes the last character or word
missing from a paragraph, as if the mouse slipped during the selection. By
the way, the collections end up being around 700 pages each, and there is an
English version and a separate French version of each collection.

1. The final document that contains the collection of reports has a few
original chapters of front and back matter such as covers, an introduction
to the collection, and an index.
2. The reports have already been published as individual documents.
3. The reports are the signed-off, accepted, and tabled product of a
government commission. That is why the collection has to reflect the
original accurately, which means, for example, any errors (e.g.
spelling)cannot be fixed. No editing or format changes are permitted.
4. The individual reports have the same organizational structure as each
other but, because there were many commissioners, writers, editors, and
lawyers involved in the creation of the original reports, there are
individual 'variations' (inconsistencies) in text elements such as lists.
For example I've had to handle lists that are completely Arabic numbered,
even sublists and subsublists of the same list.
5. My saving grace is that once published the collection will never be
edited or reused! Which helps immensely because...
6. ...nearly all elements carry overrides to make them look like the
original. I've had to perform other tricks like making table footnotes in FM
look like the table footnotes in WP. (Honestly, I couldn't find a way to
change the way FM does table footnotes.) And balancing pages to make
footnotes appear on the same page as the referring number has been a pain.

So, in case I can do it quicker than copying and pasting text, I wanted to
know if there is an automated way of importing PDF into FM (some reports can
have around 100 pages). I like the process that Richard Combs described, and
I will experiment with this - but it sounds mind numbing for sure. I will
also have to compose a hard TOC.

I have already tested if a PDF imported into a FM document, which is then
published as a PDF, is searchable (another requirement). It is.

Thanks to all of you who responded. I hope my post above more clearly shows
what I am doing. It has been an interesting gig, and is the first time (40
years in tech pubs!) I've not worked in an engineering environment. So it's
plain 'pubs' now, which is where I'm heading soon.