Thanks to all re: Adobe Acrobat and Capture

Earl Young eayoung at bna.com
Wed May 21 12:05:29 EDT 1997


     Oops!  Anything that requires a Windows operation - hence human 
     intervention - isn't thought of as a conversion around here because of 
     the volume of work we do.  I should have made clear that I was talking 
     about building a conversion process, and not merely converting a 
     handful of documents.  Even Adobe has tools that can make a 
     "reasonable" conversion happen if your volume is low enough that labor 
     costs aren't an issue.  That being said, tables and anything fairly 
     unusual normally require lots of paste-up after going through the 
     Windows-based tools we have seen.
     
     "we have seen" is a big qualifier.  There is a bunch we haven't.  What 
     are the programs you have used that can be used to convert PDF into 
     HTML?  Do they process tables, bold, italics, legal citations, and 
     position footnotes appropriately?  Do they split the graphic elements 
     into separate files and build appropriate HREF items?  What we have 
     seen from several we've tried is that they make use of <PRE> rather 
     more often that we'd like, and leave a file that needs substantial 
     amounts of by-hand effort to become usable.  We'd be interested in 
     learning the names of the programs at which we should be looking.  
     Thank you for the information.
     
     Earl Young


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: Thanks to all re: Adobe Acrobat and Capture
Author:  jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu at INTERNET
Date:    5/21/97 10:02 AM


Earl Young <eayoung at bna.com> wrote:
     
>     Converting PDF to HTML is not for the faint-of-heart and you will find 
>     scant assistance from Adobe in the process.
     
Depending on the quality of the conversion you need, this is a bit 
overstated.  Several programs allow very straightforward conversion of 
almost anything to HTML by using a printing model -- they are printer 
drivers that produce as output an HTML file, so HTML is no further away than 
your application's Print command.
     
Adobe uses this model in their PDFwriter for producing PDF documents. 
Myrmidion is an example of a Mac product that produces HTML this way.
     



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