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World Wide Web
Applications...
- Selecting
Graphics for Processing
- Selecting Text for
Processing
- Link HTML files to specific pages of
a PDF file
HTML page creation and editing is a huge industry right now,
and industry that is so profuse and dynamic that it is
extremely hard to keep up with all of the format changes and
opportunities.
Aside from PDF use for publication of documents on the
web, Acrobat is actually a good tool for aiding the HTML
editor in grabbing graphics and text from already published
materials.
Some files, like GIS files, defy clean conversion to
publication as bitmap files. By having the authors save them
as Postscript, and then distilling them to PDF, designers
can then select and copy the graphics with very clean
results.
In another very common example, suppose you have a Quark
document that has compositions of text, vector, and bitmap
graphics that are all overlapping. Screen captures don't do
justice because Quark imported graphics on-screen are very
pixelated. You could create EPS files, open and resave them
from Illustrator, import them into Photoshop and then resave
them as .jpg's but that is alot of steps for a multipage
document.
A technique we use is to convert the entire document to
PDF and then "harvest" the graphics using the technique
listed below. The resulting compositions have a scalable
resolution.
Required Components
- Minimum system requirements
- Acrobat Distiller® and
Acrobat/Exchange®.
- Image editor like Adobe Photoshop® for
manipulating selected graphics.
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1. Selecting Graphics for
Processing
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When you consider some of the characteristics of a PDF
file, you can begin to see some additional
uses--particularly in the area of file format
conversion.
- PDF is a universal format. You can make PDFs not only
from source programs like Illustrator and Word, but also
from layout and composition programs like PageMaker,
Quark, and FrameMaker. And the format is cross platform
which means you do not need to limit application
procedures to only one platform.
- PDF retains vector resolution integrity. You can view
a vector at up to 800% of size and you get a perfect
rendition of that text or vector art.
- There are two tools in Acrobat/Exchange that allow
you to select and copy elements from a PDF file that can
be used elsewhere--Select Text and Select Graphics.
One of my favorite techniques for using PDF files is to
canniballize distilled Quark compositions of text, vectors,
and bitmaps for web page creation. It is, of course,
universally useful for anything you create as a PDF.
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- Open your PDF document in Acrobat/Exchange.
- Zoom in on the area you wish to copy.* This dictates
the resolution of your Photoshop bitmap.
- Choose "Select Graphics" from the Tools menu.
- Marquee your graphic composition (or select
all).
- Go to Photoshop and File/New. This creates a blank
bitmap image area the size of your selected graphic.
- Paste the selected graphic into the new window.
- In some versions of Photoshop, this creates a new
layer. If so, you need to "flatten" the resulting image
(in the Layers Palette) before saving in any format other
than Photoshop.
- You can then edit and resize to your heart's content
and save to any format for web pages or other uses.
*One of the great things about this technique is that it
is totally scalable. With 800% zoom-in capabiltity, you can
create very large blowups of small vector compositions for
transferring to Photoshop.
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2. Selecting Text for
Processing
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The good news about PDF conversion of text documents is
that it retains the size and style of the text, the layout
position of the text, and the kerning position of
letters.
Unfortunately, these strong points are also its weak
points, depending upon your use of the documents:
- Regarding style of text, if the original has text
that has been bolded, distilling will sometimes produce a
manufactured bold version of that copy (that is, plain
text that is plotted 4 times around an original to effect
a bold look). Also, text that has been "Shadowed" in
style treatment will sometimes distill with two lines of
plain text to effect the shadow look.
- The layout position of text means that each
horizontal line of text is treated as a separate layout
element. Text that was word processed as a paragraph with
word wrapping, now has hard returns at the end of each
line.
- The kerning postion of letters can affect how text is
laid out in the PDF file. For instance, simple kerning or
tracking instructions within a line of text in Quark will
distill into a PDF with each letter separated onto its
own baseline, making it virtually uneditable within
Acrobat/Exchange (or Illustrator for that matter).
Still, the Select Text (under menu item Tools in
Acrobat/Exchange) has some uses and there are also a number
of plugins now available to help the user "harvest" text
from a PDF file.
What You Do..
- Open your PDF document in Acrobat/Exchange.
- Select the "Select Text" menu item under Tools.
- Clicking and dragging over text will select it and it
can be copied. TIP: If there is a vertical selection of
text that you want, like a column in a table for
instance, hold down the Option-key (Macintosh) or
Control-key (Windows) while click-dragging.
- Open your text editor and paste.
New with version 4.0 (Windows only)
The Table Selection tool has a preference checkbox
(File/Preferences/Table/Formatted Text.../General) for
specifying "Preserve Line Breaks." By unchecking this box,
line breaks are NOT preserved. This makes it easier to copy
text into paragraphs. For this feature to work, you MUST use
the Table/Formatted Text Selection tool to marquee the text
block.
For other "harvesting" approaches for dealing with text
in a PDF file, check out some of the "plug-ins"
currently available in our Third Party section (notably
Redwing from BCL
Computing).
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3. Linking HTML files to specific
pages of a PDF file
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New with Acrobat 4:
If your URL says
http://...foo.pdf#page=17
Acrobat 4.0 will open the document on page 17. This is
new in Acrobat 4.0. Previous versions of Acrobat will
open the document on page 1 (or whatever the default open
action is). If the document is *already* open in Acrobat
when such a URL link is used, the document gains focus
but does not change pages. This was a late addition and
missed the documentation cutoff.
Pre-4.x versions of Acrobat:
From Gordon Kent's website
on Internet Publishing with Acrobat...
Phil Smith of the University of Nottingham has a
script for Acrobat
Distiller 3.0 which enables HTML links to open a specific
page of a PDF file. The link syntax would be something
like:
http://www.mysite.com/test.pdf#Page23
Note: The script, which must be copied to Distiller's
startup directory, works only with Acrobat Distiller 3.0.
(So you may need to re-distill many files to get this
functionality).
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