Okay, so this is all I have left is this PDF,
That's it,
but i need this content.
I'm going to go ahead and recreate this PDF
in InDesign and
it won't take me that long, in this case, one page, but here's a perfect example
it was much easier for me to just take this PDF
instead of just trying to enter it in acrobat
you know, hack it back into something else I could use. I want to use this same
layout, the same formats,
but then
changing logo content to be for another product.
Well, for this product, actually. Let me show you how I did that.
So, what we do, we go over here in InDesign here, in this case, CS5,
and we go to
PDF2DTP
and, as we saw, we go to "Convert PDF"
It's pretty much that simple.
Then select the PDF you want to convert which will be this
Q2ID marketing brochure,
and we click the Open here.
It's pretty much that simple.
You see
in seconds
the file is converted.
Now, there is some small touching up to do
It's a fact of life in going from
a scrambled PDF,
a PDF which scrambles the information chaotically throughout the file format,
but you see it's quite easy, simple things to do.
We'll be improving this all along the way, of course.
Q2ID logo anymore,
so I went in and placed
the PDF logo.
Place that there.
We get that and we come over here. Of course, we change the text
to be indicative of...
well, you get the idea. This is what we did. So, here's what we finally got out of that.
I'll obviously save this out.
You know, you can save out anything you have converted.
File > Save As. It's that easy.
And here's what I got. In recent, I'll find it right here.
So, it's the same exact file I converted. I went in and did some touching up.
Removing the Q2ID logo.
Some other things and
did some adjusting to the layout,
but effectively this is what we have now:
old content,
in this case, just
you know a simple example of a layout. I want to keep the general format of,
and, in some general text I wanted to reuse,
that I can then repurpose for
a new product, in this case,
or perhaps you want to repurpose the entire content
and just add new images or you want to keep the same images, but add new content.
So, it's that easy
with PDF2DTP
from Markzware.
Let's drop this PDF onto FlightCheck. Drop on the FlightCheck flight strip
and FlightCheck will start to check the file.
So let's see what's in that PDF and compare it to what
we get in the converted file with
PDF2DTP.
What you see right away is this PDF was originally an
Illustrator file,
which is quite interesting.
In general, we see that the fonts used, and that's where I really want to
look deeper in. Let's now
go in and convert that file again
with PDF2DTP.
Here we go.
Now, there is a little problem here. This EPS, the vector
Illustrator
contents gets a little bit
messed up
and that's something,
these are items we're addressing.
It doesn't matter, in this case, we just get rid of it.
In any event, what I want to look at here is some particular
elements.
Okay, so which font is used up here?
Futura.
Heavy. Let me go back over to FlightCheck,
and we'll see indeed we have here Futura Heavy,
but, in general, what I want to see here is that
the conversion is bringing over all
stylization,
font sizes,
colors,
trapping,
layers, when applied correctly into the PDF. Everything's coming over,
which is really the
great handy part about
PDF2DTP is that it will save a ton of time.
So, there might be a couple little touching ups to do, but, in general,
This is quite an amazing tool!
If you don't have fonts, we can also substitute missing fonts.
You'll see
we have clicked on to convert everything: character styles, paragraph styles,
the bleed,
even pasteboard items, etc.,
and this will all be saved and images extracted out
into the default folder.
You can change that to be somewhere else, if you wish.
You can handle this problem every time before converting. You can convert just a certain
page range. For instance, if you have a huge PDF, it might take a little bit longer to convert.
So, maybe you only need, you know,
page 50 through 100 and you just
"Convert Page Range"
and just to give you an idea, let's
back out of this file here.
Let's open another file here.
Now, you're talking about files which will
be multi-paged
and when you have a multi-page file, it quickly gets
very advantageous to rather convert than to create anew.
So, now you see when you have fonts that are
not available,
you might want to better substitute them.
Those preferences in
PDF2DTP can change the conversion drastically, so you'll want to tinker with those if
you have odd
results.
Look at that!
Fantastic way to get content from PDF files right into InDesign
with Markzware's
PDF2DTP.
And we cruise on over into our
User folder in our Documents folder
and then in there we'll get a PDF2DTP folder.
Inside of there, we get both of our different versions of PDF2DTP
and in the InDesign folder, you'll see
the files I recently converted
and there's the Q2ID file.
Now, this is a
vector-based file, so
that converts it differently, but if I look in some of the other files we
converted, what you'll see is we
extract out
all of the images along with creating a new layout for that file.
We showed you just this file a moment ago, as well.
Incredible!
The amount of time and money this tool will save you just by extracting these images
alone,
not to mention, of course, the
the getting the files themselves back.
So, really quite an amazing feat this PDF2DTP is providing.
I'm quite certain you'll also find it very useful.
It's the hammer you must have in your toolbox
to help bring
order out of chaos to get PDF files, which are chaotic in format internally,
salvage them out to something you can use,
namely
InDesign.
If you need more information on Markzware's PDF2DTP,
cruise on over to
markzware.com/products/pdf2dtp
There you'll get more demonstration videos,
features and benefits,
a full description
demo download and, of course, system requirements.
PDF2DTP from Markzware
A fantastic way to open and edit files
within
InDesign
or in Quark.
Thank you. David Dilling of Markzware, signing off.