Minor typos and the QA guy/scrummaster

[jackdeland at comcast.net]

I think maybe a summary rather than a link to ALL the comments here. ;-) 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Courlis" <neat_gent at yahoo.com> 
To: "Mike Wickham" <info at mikewickham.com>, framers at lists.frameusers.com 
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 1:12:56 PM 
Subject: Re: Minor typos and the QA guy/scrummaster 



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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