Copying from PDF

You're probably copying as a bitmap, which is bad. You need to copy as vectors. I think it depends on the PDF itself. The only way to work these things I aware of, in Windows, is to open the clipboard viewer and use a program called Metafile Companion. Metafiles are Window's way of encapsulating all kinds of image information. I was able to create vector clip art for Office by copying from Autocad's screen and pasting into Companion. Then you can re-size with no quality penalty. Thing is, they look as bad on-screen as before, but they print out nice.

BTW disk space is pretty much free these days no? 500G for less than

200$. That's a lot of PDFs.

Are you cutting just a portion of a page, or a whole page?

If whole page, use Adobe to extract that page.

If partial, perhaps use something like Universal Document Converter to make a GIF that you can manually edit/crop?

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
         America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave

To extract single pages, I use pdftops to convert the multi-page PDF into a PS file, then I extract the page(s) that I want using psselect, and convert the resulting PS back to PDF. All wrapped nicely into a shell script.

robert

I have come across two types of Adobe documents in this effort. In some, I can use the Acrobat reader snapshot tool to get a piece of a page. In others, the snapshot is disabled, so I have used the Windows Printscreen function to get a bitmap I can crop down to the part I need.

I am including in the SCD the URL for the origianl docuemnt, and a link to the copy of the document where it is stored on our network. Unfortunately, all networks (including our own) are temporary, so I wnat to include in the SCD itself as good an image as possible of the information in the original pdf, then print it out and store it in a real steel file cabinet.

Even early versions of Adobe will extract single pages.

I think the problem is how to compactly get just a portion of a page... if you "crop" a PDF page the file size DOES NOT reduce.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
         America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave

Depends. If the PDF contains a bitmap (such as a scanned page), you can extract that bitmap, crop out the section of interest with an image editor, and convert the result back to PDF. The file size will reduce accordingly if you use the same (or even a better) compression scheme as the original.

If the PDF is a vector document, cropping out a part can be hard or impossible. But vector docs typically occupy much less space than bitmaps anyway.

robert

Adobe, as usual, works against us.

If you open a doc in (the incredibly stupid) Adobe Reader8, you can zoom in and print the current view. If you have the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer, or the Universal Document Converter, you can then print to a file. It looks pretty good, not perfect but better than snapping a bitmap.

You can't print the current view to CutePDF, pity.

John

Adobe photoshop can open a PDF. If it is multipage, you can select which page to open. You can set the resolution that you want for rendering.

I haven't use ghostview in some time, but it may be pdf tools as well. This is an alternative if you don't have photoshop.

What I figured out...

I converted the word document which is the company standaqrd format for SCDs (title page and rectangular frame on following pages) to a pdf, extracted one page from the catalog using Adobe Acrobat, cropped it, and pasted it into the SCD pdf document as background, scaling it down a little to fit in the frame.

It looks and prints as good as the original catalog page. The only unwanted consequence is that the final document is a pdf instead of a Word document, but CM has agreed to accept it.

Drop the document into Adobe Frust^H^H^H^H Illustrator, select the relevant page and get whatever vector art you need. You can convert it to a bitmap at whatever resolution you need.

I haven't read all the other replies but I have had no problems using Adobe Reader's 'Select' function for selecting text and pictures and then pasting them direct into a MS Word doc.

Then you're sunk anyway. A few Word updates down the road you won't be able to open your documentation files any more.

Use OpenOffice; it has an open document format (which means that you can still get at the content of your docs even in case of future version incompatibilities -- heck, it's XML, you can open it with any text editor), is available for free, it exports directly to PDF and can import and export several Word formats.

Don't chain yourself to proprietary software for important business matters.

robert

Hi Richard,

Just Copy &Paste extracts a bitmap with screen resolution. You may improove this by zoom after select. then you get the hole selected picture with a resolution of the zoomed section. But remember this will also be a bitmap. Vector graphics - only if the pictures are as a vector graphic included in PDF (extremely seldom) - may be exported with the toolchain gsview, ghostscript, pstoedit. It's all free and very useable, a must in all computers :-) Simply open your pdf with gsview, select your page and convert the sheet to emf, wmf or any other vector format you are able to handle later. I use emf and import these in OpenOffice.org Draw. There I ungroup the picture and have all I need. The only drawback is, that OOo Draw have a preselection that makes mistakes with texts. The frames around the Texts are to small after ungrouping and the preselection is to shrink the font size to frame. So I have to click all text elements and reszies the frames and adjuats the text- options to resize the frame as needed to draw the fonts to original size.

Another tip: search about djvu compressor. Its impressive how small documents can be compressed with very good quality.

Marte

You have got to be kidding! Right?!

-mpm

I agree with you in theory, but as a practical matter I don't get to decide (yet) what the company's policies are for office software tools.

Also, I can edit text fields in teh PDF documents within Acrobat itself, which at least moves the problem out of Microsoft's domain.

Lizardtech dropped the free djvu encoders some years ago. [I have the old programs fortunately.] However, I found jpeg2000 to be better.

This is free, but it might be crippled in some manner. [I have the old version with the file size limit.]

The easiest free high quality compressor to use is the ECW format in Ifranview.

Kidding about what?

It works, and a lot of us need Illustrator for our work anyway. It's often best to keep it in vector format, but not always possible or desirable.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

Hi Miso,

I can't follow this. I downloaded my djvu encoder few weeks ago. It was free.

Should I have to look for ...

Oh no, thanks...

the good old irfan... even nice to view djvu and many more...

But I will give ECW a try... Thanks

Marte

I can't find a link for the encoder, just decoders.