Minor typos and the QA guy/scrummaster

[Mike Wickham]

 > He wants a solution that bypasses the need for FrameMaker, and has 
read an article that says Word 2013 will allow editing of PDFs in native 
format. He wants the developers to be able to do this to my docs.
 >

Ignoring the fact that Microsoft is famous for talking about features in 
future products that never actually make it into the release, or that 
possible release dates are rarely met, doesn't your QA guy realize that 
PDFs don't store information the same way as normal documents? They 
don't necessarily store paragraphs as paragraphs or even store words as 
words-- but may store them as separate groupings of letters. And 
elements on the PDF page aren't necessarily generated in the order you 
expect. (See page 25 of the PDF at this link: 
http://www.planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/pdf2k/02E/gstaas_howpdfworks.pdf.) 
(I've seen a better explanation of this somewhere, but couldn't find it.)

So any program that reads a PDF takes its best guess in reconstituting 
text back into words and paragraphs. In other words, what you see in the 
PDF may not be what you get in the converted Word doc, nor in the 
regenerated PDF.  I found this description of the Word 2013 PDF editing 
feature to back that up:

----
With Word 2013, you can convert a PDF document into a Word document and 
edit the content.

To convert a PDF, you open it like you would any other document.

 1. Click *File* > *Open* > *Browse*.
 2. Find the PDF and click *Open*.

The converted document might not have a perfect page to page 
correspondence with the original. The conversion works best with mostly 
textual documents.

----

Notice that last part. "The converted document might not have a perfect 
page to page correspondence with the original. The conversion works best 
with mostly textual documents." In other words, prepare for problems. 
Expect to lose your previous formatting. Unless you are editing simple 
business letters or novels, problems are pretty much guaranteed. (Here's 
the link: 
http://www.liveside.net/2012/06/29/exclusive-microsoft-word-2013-to-support-built-in-pdf-editing/.)

PDFs are meant to be final output only. To fix typos in a PDF, the 
standard procedure is to fix the source file and regenerate a corrected 
PDF. (If you don't fix the source, the typo just reappears the next time 
an updated PDF is generated.)

Mike Wickham

<http://www.liveside.net/2012/06/29/exclusive-microsoft-word-2013-to-support-built-in-pdf-editing/> 

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