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Subject:Re: customizable documentation From:JimGroark -at- aol -dot- com To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com Date:Mon, 17 Jan 2000 09:31:04 EST
Assuming the customer has Acrobat 4.0, they could use the Text Tool,
Columnar Text Tool, and/or Table Tool to copy the guts of the PDF file
and paste as formatted text into, say, an MS Word document. Then
they could use Word's find and replace function.
I've recently done this with some Navy documents.
VR
Jim Groark
========================================
On Fri, 14 Jan 2000 Nick Klasovsky wrote in response to Philomena Hoopes:
>> One of our customers, having received their first documentation in PDF
>> format, proceeded to ask whether they could have editable files.
>> Specifically, they want to change the references to system-assigned field
>> names, substituting their customized names.
>
>Simple: unlock the PDF files, if you have them locked, and tell them to buy
>a copy of Acrobat (full version) so they can open and edit the files
>themselves. You can edit text in PDF files with Exchange, but you cannot
>add new lines to a paragraph, or new paragraphs. For what they want to do,
this
>should work.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is a practical solution. Acrobat Exchange
3.0 (and presumably its replacement, Acrobat 4.0) does have a Find function,
but
*not* a Find and Replace; as a consequence, the replacements would have
to be done manually, which would be awfully tedious. Also, since Exchange
is strictly a *line* editor, if the replacement string is significantly
different in
length from the original string, you'd be introducing irregularities in line
length because the line wrapping cannot adjust. This irregularity might be
acceptable in ragged-right text, but and string length difference would be
disastrous
in fully justified text.
Fred Ridder
Senior Technical Writer
Dialogic, an Intel Company
Parsippany, NJ
