<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<font size="2">> </font><font size="2">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.<br>
><br>
<br>
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. </font><font size="2">And elements
on the PDF page aren't necessarily generated in the order you
expect. </font><font size="2">(</font><font size="2">See page 25
of the PDF at this link: <a
href="http://www.planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/pdf2k/02E/gstaas_howpdfworks.pdf">http://www.planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/pdf2k/02E/gstaas_howpdfworks.pdf</a></font><font
size="2">.) (I've seen a better explanation of this somewhere, but
couldn't find it.)<br>
<br>
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:<br>
<br>
----<br>
</font>With Word 2013, you can convert a PDF document into a Word
document and edit the content.
<p>To convert a PDF, you open it like you would any other document.</p>
<ol>
<li>Click <b>File</b> > <b>Open</b> > <b>Browse</b>. </li>
<li>Find the PDF and click <b>Open</b>.</li>
</ol>
<p>The converted document might not have a perfect page to page
correspondence with the original. The conversion works best with
mostly textual documents.</p>
----<br>
<br>
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: <a
href="http://www.liveside.net/2012/06/29/exclusive-microsoft-word-2013-to-support-built-in-pdf-editing/">http://www.liveside.net/2012/06/29/exclusive-microsoft-word-2013-to-support-built-in-pdf-editing/</a>.)<br>
<br>
<font size="2">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.)</font><br>
<br>
Mike Wickham<br>
<br>
<a
href="http://www.liveside.net/2012/06/29/exclusive-microsoft-word-2013-to-support-built-in-pdf-editing/"></a>
</body>
</html>