Copying a pdf file

[mario]

Is it possible to copy a pdf file into say word,just cant seem to do it,was trying to make my booking form look a bit more proffessional.

[Sue Dyer]

Hi Mario
Exactly what do you want to do with it? Is it a graphic you are putting in or is your whole form a pdf you want to make a Word doc?

Give me an idea and I'll try and help. I have full Acrobat so can save as and edit etc. cheers

[mario]

Its a booking form but someone elses so I want to adapt it to my place

[Normandy Cow]

My understading is that the whole point of issuing PDFs is that to preserve the integrity of the original document it shouldn't be possible for someone to just copy it into Word and then amend the text.

But I'm not too sure how you can stop someone from doing so, if they also have Adobe Acrobat writer!

But even then, I don't think it's that easy as I found myself when I tried to reverse-engineer Rocket Rab's booking form for her when she just wanted to amend one line of text. There was some problem with the embedded font in my version of Acrobat. In the end I think I saved the document as a bitmap file, imported it into photoshop, then pasted in some text using photoshop, then saved the photoshop document back as a pdf.

Fiddly, and a bit messy, but got there in the end!!!!

See this thread: viewtopic.php?t=4764&highlight=pdf
(And yes, she did buy me a pineau when I met her at her place this summer!)

[Rosbif]

Hi yes I agree, you can't edit a PDF and even with full Acrobat I don't know if you can actually edit something or just makes notes etc on it ... not sure. You really need the document in its 'raw' state!

[Sue Dyer]

Agreed. Even with the full package I think you can "save as" but you don't get the formatting?

The full programme is on my upstairs machine and I'm currently downstairs with limited mobility. I'll have a look later when I go up. I know I've messed around with them at work before but quite a while ago.

[vrooje]

I think it depends on how the PDF file was created. If it was done in a smart way then Acrobat will know what's text and what's images, etc. In that case, I've been able to select text in a PDF document so that I can copy-paste it into another document.

But if the program which originally created the PDF didn't tell Acrobat what's text (so that it thinks the whole thing is one big image), you won't be able to do that.

In the time it takes you to figure out how to do this, you might be able to just transcribe the document.

[mario]

In the time it takes you to figure out how to do this, you might be able to just transcribe the document

Your probably right.

[Alan Knighting]

If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro you can usually amend text by using the Touchup Text tool but you must have a licensed copy of the appropriate font installed on your system.