Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 607 Location: Australia
Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 6:28 pm Post subject: New Feature proposal: PDF import
This thread was split from the main New Features thread; Steve's original post is also the first post mentioning QuickTime support and thus is elsewhere.
SteveRead wrote:
Another thing that would be nice, if possible, would be the ability to import pdfs into Writer. Many people use pdfs of figures in their documents.
Is this possible? It would be amazing to have an editable version of a pdf imported. Or would it just be like importing a jpg file?
Anyway, this notion of paying by voting is good lateral thinking, Patrick
Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 11:58 pm Post subject: Re: Possible
aussie149 wrote:
SteveRead wrote:
Another thing that would be nice, if possible, would be the ability to import pdfs into Writer. Many people use pdfs of figures in their documents.
Is this possible? It would be amazing to have an editable version of a pdf imported. Or would it just be like importing a jpg file?
There was a thread about this quite some time ago (2-3 years...have I been here that long?!) over at OOoForum about this; in fact, someone was working on an import filter...but for Draw. PDF really is a page description/graphics format, so it's most easily imported into drawing programs. The sense I got from the fellow working on the filter was that it would be possible, but significantly more work--orders of magnitude--to get any useful import of PDF into Writer. (By useful I mean things like margins, text runs as lines or paragraphs instead of small blocks of text, etc.)
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 10:09 am Post subject: Importing pdfs into Writer
I wasn't talking about importing a pdf in an editable form. I was simply talking about the ability to have pdf be one of the many picture formats that Writer can use when you want to import a picture. When I write academic papers I need to include figures at the end of the paper or sometimes embedded in the text. This is possible in Word and it would be nice if the same thing was possible in Writer.
Well, I think that it depends on what you want to edit.
AFAIK there are utilities to convert pdf files to pure text files, so that you can open it in NeoOffice. Try this (shareware) or google a bit for it.
This certainly doesn't work if the pdf page is been obtained as an image (for example if it is been taken from a scanner), but does work if it comes from a text editor.
The import filter for writer that people at OOo was working on some years ago had the same feature.
The new filter, that is for Draw, has similar feature as The Gimp: you can edit the pdf file as an image.
Joined: Nov 21, 2005 Posts: 1285 Location: Witless Protection Program
Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 1:35 pm Post subject: Re: Importing pdfs into Writer
SteveRead wrote:
I wasn't talking about importing a pdf in an editable form. I was simply talking about the ability to have pdf be one of the many picture formats that Writer can use when you want to import a picture. When I write academic papers I need to include figures at the end of the paper or sometimes embedded in the text.
This is possible in Word and it would be nice if the same thing was possible in Writer.
Really?!?
1. Does this work on MS Word for Windows, Mac, or both??
2. How did you copy the .PDF image to Word? Cut&Paste, Clipboard, Import???
I thought I had tried this a long time ago on Windows and did not get usable results.
Our company publishes a LOT of documents in .PDF and I have never had luck with Word.
You can copy images from .PDF to other documents, and
it's fairly easy to copy/extract text from .PDF to documents.
I would be interested in learning more about what you have done, and what you would like to do with Neo. Maybe we could both learn something new!
Philip ( See! NeoOffice is making me ... smarter - Again! )
Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 607 Location: Australia
Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 10:46 pm Post subject:
valterb wrote:
Well, I think that it depends on what you want to edit.
AFAIK there are utilities to convert pdf files to pure text files, so that you can open it in NeoOffice. Try this (shareware) or google a bit for it.
Valter
Hi Valter, thanks. I think that that is a Windows application? There is an add-on PDF Services that someone here put me onto that allows me to import the text from a pdf into TextEdit. That works well on text, although all formatting is pretty well lost. No images survive either. I have looked at KWord a bit on linux: it can import some images and more of the formatting with its filter: in fact, a filter of the type that Kword uses would be quite a bit more useful than PDF services. I have used the kWord on X11 to try same, but I don't think it converts as much of the original. I can't verify that now, because I can't get KDE onto my X11 any more [I got too vigorous with cleaning up files at some stage and ditched some essential stuff ;( ]
Of course, if your PDF isn't hundreds of pages, you can just open it in Preview and Save As, a page at a time, to JPG, TIF, PNG etc. and then drop each page into Neo as an image
Joined: Dec 08, 2005 Posts: 291 Location: Berlin, Germany
Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 5:14 am Post subject:
yoxi wrote:
Of course, if your PDF isn't hundreds of pages, you can just open it in Preview and Save As, a page at a time, to JPG, TIF, PNG etc. and then drop each page into Neo as an image
That's right, but you loose one great advantage: PDF is a vector based format. I have to write a lot of technical stuff with schemas and graphs etc. which I usually design in OmniGraffle and then import into my text document as PDF (always one page only). As almost everything is vector based in these PDF docments (type, boxes, curves etc.), they scale nicely in Pages when I have to adjust the size of them (as concerning MS Word: I may place a PDF in a document, but it behaves when being scaled like a bitmap, so no advantage there).
This is a feature I certainly would like to have in NeoOffice, but I have a feeling that this would be very complicated to implement. But if feasable, I rather would like to use it than Adress Book or Thunderbird integration - which is why I think the proposal to donate for specific features is really a great idea!
Joined: Dec 08, 2005 Posts: 291 Location: Berlin, Germany
Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 5:38 am Post subject: Re: Importing pdfs into Writer
LemonAid wrote:
SteveRead wrote:
I wasn't talking about importing a pdf in an editable form. I was simply talking about the ability to have pdf be one of the many picture formats that Writer can use when you want to import a picture. When I write academic papers I need to include figures at the end of the paper or sometimes embedded in the text.
This is possible in Word and it would be nice if the same thing was possible in Writer.
Really?!?
1. Does this work on MS Word for Windows, Mac, or both??
2. How did you copy the .PDF image to Word? Cut&Paste, Clipboard, Import???
1. As far as I know, this does not work on Windows.
2. Works with Insert > Image > From File..., and Drag&Drop. Behaves in MS Word like bitmap image when scaled.
Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 5:45 pm Post subject: trapeze
I use Trapeze into which I drop small and huge pdf files, and save as text. then I open with Neooffice, and save - giving me great control over forms that I use in my practice. two steps, yes, but I am satisfied.
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