Importing a PDF document to Flare

[Sycamore]

I want to import a PDF document to Flare.
Can I use the Flare import feature to do this ??

[LTinker68]

Just copy it into the Flare project using Windows Explorer. (The Flare import feature won't decompile the PDF file, if that's what you were hoping.) So just copy the file in, then you can link to it from the TOC or from within a topic.

[wbrisett]

Lisa: I'm going to guess that's now what they are wanting to do. A lot of people (my company included) have tons of documents floating around. Sometimes they are generated by support or some other organization, then turned into tech pubs documents. If the source material isn't available (which can and does happen more times than most people care to imagine), then we use the PDF as the source. My guess is that's what is being asked here. Can a PDF be turned into a Flare topic/topics. If that is the question, that Sycamore is asking then the answer is no, there is no import into Flare for that process.

I have seen some software utilities that will take PDFs and deconstruct them into Word and text, which could be used, but in most cases it's just as much work as copy and pasting the information into topics.

Wayne

[LTinker68]

If you have Adobe Acrobat it can do the conversion for you -- save it to a Word file and then import that into Flare. Or copy-and-paste from Word into Flare. If you have OCR software you can also use that to scan the PDF and save to Word.

So there is no native way to convert a PDF into content in Flare but there are multiple tools out there that can get to the content, at least, if not the images, although if you have Photoshop or Illustrator then you can also get to the images that way.

[fchan]

What are the advantages of this approach, which is:
1. Use Acrobat to save the PDF into Word.
2. Import the Word document into Flare.

vs this approach:
1. Open the PDF file.
2. Copy and paste the content into Flare.

You can preserve the appearance of the document in Flare with the first approach but all paragraphs and headings are tagged with the <p> tag. So you have to re-tag them manually in Flare. With the second approach, the appearance is not preserved and you also have to re-tag. But the amount of work that goes into making the PDF document into a Flare topic seems to be the same with either approach. Did I miss something? Is there an easier way? Thanks so much for any tips.

[arronlee]

Yup indeed, I agree with LTinker68. A fine OCR SDK can help you scan the PDF and extract the data from your PDF files and the save that to Word for you. So a fine PDF converting/processingtool must have a fine OCR SDK in it, too. Or you can convert PDF to text via a 3rd party PDF tool, here is the tutorial:

in the Reader panel "File" >> "Save as..." >> "Text" or "Word"

But if you find that you could not have that done, you might face another problem - The PDF file is secured, you need to unlock PDF first then you can save the PDF as "Word" or "Text".

Or, you could use some PDF Converter which could remove the restriction and convert PDF to word at the same time.

Then you can preserve the appearance of the document in Flare successfully.

Hope it help:)

[ouku]

YEs, you need just copy the file in, then you can link to it from the TOC or from within a topic.