Transferring the PDF to a Word Processor


Maure Castle


So I'm going to start on this for my players. However I'm running this in my home brew and it also needs to conform to my adventure needs and plot line.

Beyond these modifications I have to rework some of the combats to get them to become a lot more interactive with, well whatever I can think of really, just so long as it makes furniture fly around and creates interesting and dynamic combats as my players have become pretty jaded with the basic table top combat system as of late so I'm working hard to make things seem more dynamic.

Thus I want to add and delete material. I got my business partner to buy the download from Paizo under the assumption that I could use that for my needs but having just spent 30 minutes playing with this I have not so far been able to get anything really useful to my word processor. Basic copy and paste creates lines that contain parts of all three columns wich is, of course, highly distorted.

Anyone know how to transfer this material to a word processor so I can work in my modifications? I have access to a Windows and Linux systems.


Somebody that has a copy of Adobe Acrobat can tranfer it back to Word, I believe.


undeaddragonhunter wrote:
Somebody that has a copy of Adobe Acrobat can tranfer it back to Word, I believe.

Yeah, or the low rent way is to save it as a plain text file (using "save as..", edit the text file in Word and then save it out to a PDF file using a PDF printer, or whatever format you prefer, really.

If you want to keep the magazine format, you could open up the page(s) you want to edit in Photoshop or GIMP, edit them using cut/paste/text tools and layering and then resave all the pages individually as tifs (or some other mostly-losses format) and then rebuild a new PDF out of the image files, but you'll lose your ability to search the text.

Since you have access to a *nix box, you could go super-crazy, get a copy of TeX or LaTeX running, import the text file and really go to town, but there is a bit of a learning curve for TeX.


undeaddragonhunter wrote:
Somebody that has a copy of Adobe Acrobat can tranfer it back to Word, I believe.

Yeah - it turned out part of my problem was using Linux's Document Viewer which does not have some of the features of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Now that I am on my home Windows Based Computer I see that I can either create a Rich Text file or I can get a slightly better version by using the Copy to Clip Board Option and pasting that into Open Office (and presumably Word).

Either option still leaves me something of a mess but its at least using the copy file to clip board and paste method keeps the fonts and colours which makes it easier to put things back together since the Read Aloud Text is in a different font and the Room Heading are in different fonts so I get a visual indicator of what kind of text I am looking at and how I should go about editing that into a format I can use. This is far preferable to making everything into Rich Text since there is little indication, using that method, of what text is serving what purpose.

Not a perfect solution but probably no more then an hour and a half worth of editing, not a big deal since I expect to pump forty or so hours into rewriting (and if past experience is any indicator my forty hour estimate will prove to be too low by half).

Thanks for the answers guys.

Dark Archive

Another solution would be using an OCR program like Fine Reader or Omnipage. At least in Fine Reader you have the Option to save the read file as an rtf or doc. Training the program might take some time but it would leave the layout intact.


Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:
Beyond these modifications I have to rework some of the combats to get them to become a lot more interactive with, well whatever I can think of really, just so long as it makes furniture fly around and creates interesting and dynamic combats as my players have become pretty jaded with the basic table top combat system as of late so I'm working hard to make things seem more dynamic.

Furniture flying around made me think of RJK's "Living Room" ;)

Allan.


I'd be interested in reading your re-write. Any chances of you posting/hosting it somewhere?


Paul Ackerman 70 wrote:
I'd be interested in reading your re-write. Any chances of you posting/hosting it somewhere?

Its mostly just a rewrite to bring things in line with my homebrew. Remove all the Greyhawk specific content and such.

Its been a major pain in the butt to rework the story so that Eli Tomorast did not come back from the dead - since thats a no no in my campaign world, you can't come back.

Anyway the short answer is basically no. I think posting anything major in this regards would be a major copyright infringement - especially since I might, at some future date, show off my redone 3d maps of the place. I think that makes it doubly imperative that I don't give out any kind of usable text on the adventure itself, I don't really want to be slapped by one of the powers that be for going to far over the line with their intellectual property - sorry.

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