Minor typos and the QA guy/scrummaster

[Peter Courlis]

Hello
Wonderful stimulating discussion on "Typos" and handling "PDF's" .

Be sure to send a Link, to the Scrum Master, for Framers at lists.frameusers.com ...
For he is about to learn some new things ...

A Nuebie



________________________________
 From: Mike Wickham <info at mikewickham.com>
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com 
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 9:53 AM
Subject: Re: Minor typos and the QA guy/scrummaster
 

> 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

 
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