A: Karen
Timberlake:
"Several of the
answers to this question are quite complex. When a PDF is ready, it
can easily be converted by the owner to Adobe Reader by clicking comments
and allow commenting on PDF. This can be saved as a reader..... and
sent to the person editing. Now that person can use boxes, arrows,
etc to add comments to the PDF. It costs nothing to convert
a PDF to a reader PDF and costs nothing for the editing person. They
just need to download Adobe Reader 8.0."
A: Jeffrey
Childs:
"The full version
of Adobe Acrobat will let you both read and write (edit) PDF
files. It can be found at http://www.adobe.com."
A: Laura
Taalman:
Laura
Taalman |
"If you originally
wrote the book in LaTeX, which was modified in the revision process
by the publisher and then converted to PDF, you may be able to recover
the LaTeX files from the compositor."
A: Dustin
Wax:
"To make edits
directly to the PDF files, you can try Foxit Pro. It costs $99.00,
but there's a 6 month free trial. Working directly with PDF won't
allow you all the niceties of a word processor, though. If you
want to just extract the text, there are a number of options:
1)
You can email your document as an attachment to Adobe's conversion service,
which will return either text or formatted HTML. For raw text, use pdf2txt@adobe.com;
for html, pdf2html@adobe.com.
Note: the text version will not have any formatting (bold, italics,
etc.). The HTML version will retain that, but probably not the
layout. What I'd do is paste the HTML into the code editor of
Google Docs, and download it as a Word file. Note, too: complicated
Math formulas may not come our tight.
2) Use an OCR
program like ABBYY PDF Transformer Pro (http://www.pdftransformer.com/).
PDF transformer is designed to convert PDF to MS Office formats.
Assuming the text is indexed in the file (which it probably
is) it shouldn't introduce any new errors (the way running OCR on, say,
a scanned document would).
3) Another
converter is VeryPDF's PDF to Word (http://www.verypdf.com/pdf2word/index.html)
which also promises to retain formatting and layout.
I haven't used
any of these programs, though I've used others by some of the same
companies. ABBYY's OCR software is really exceptional, and I assume that
PDF Transformer is a specialized subset of their much more expensive full-featured
OCR suite. Foxit's Reader is an amazingly fast replacement for Adobe
Reader -- I recommend it to all my students who have problems reading stuff
like my syllabus in PDF format. I've never used any VeryPDF programs before;
I just came across it googling the other sites I mentioned."
A: Myrna
Rochester:
"We did a little
looking around. An ad for just such a program appeared in our mailbox
a few days ago. It's PDF Converter 5, by Nuance (formerly ScanSoft): http://www.nuance.com/pdfconverter/ They say it converts PDF files into a wide range of word-processor
formats (Word, Wordperfect, Rich Text, etc.) and allows direct
editing of PDF files. The standard version sells for $50 and
the "Professional" version for $100. It looks promising, and
you may want to look into it. I've never used either, but judging
from the information on their website, we're guessing the standard
version would be fine for your purposes."
A: Barbara
Waxer:
Barbara
Waxer |
"What you're describing
is known as a tear-sheet revision, and assuming your changes
en toto are not massive, it is by far the most cost-effective way for
your publisher to revise your text. I'm a little surprised they didn't insist
you do this (mine does).
Adobe Acrobat
8.0 Professional can easily accommodate all your editing needs.
You can delete and add text, insert text boxes as comments, attach Word
files (or any file), insert a photo or graphic for illustration purposes,
hyperlinks, etc. At Cengage Learning, the general rule is to type text
directly in the PDF if it's only a couple short paragraphs and then attach
a Word doc if the additions are more extensive.
That said, you
need to make sure your publisher is set up to translate the PDF back
to InDesign or Quark or whatever publishing software they use. Your editor
should be able to guide you on this. Oh, and they should definitely reimburse
you for your purchase of Acrobat.
Another option
to remember is that you can select all the text in any PDF (Ctrl-A)
and paste it into a Word doc. You won't get figures and perhaps some
tables, but certainly the text, along with other pdf codes you can easily
search and replace to create a clean document."
