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• • November 25, 2009 at 11:24 pm #53992
    Aleta El Sheikh

    Participant

    Does anyone have a trick for copy/pasting from PDFs without having every line-ending turn into a paragraph return? My trick is rather klugey and involves pretending to add an article to my church website using its wysiwyg editor, which has a “Paste as plain text” button. Once I paste it in there, I can copy it again, but of course I also lose the “true” paragraph returns when I paste it in InDesign. Is there some other way to do it?

    I'm using CS2 on a Windows XP machine.

  • November 26, 2009 at 12:43 am #53995
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Are there any text editors that allow GREP find/change? if there are, you could do a search that turned any hard returns into a space:

    find r change to s,

    then, if there's a tab character, or multiple spaces at the beginning of each paragraph, you could search and change multiple spaces to a hard return:

    find s{2}|t change to r

    this would work in CS4 with the GREP find/change, i don't know if there's any other programs that would do that, maybe BBedit or something, i don't know what programs have that functionality built into it other than CS4 because i have CS4 and it gets the job done.

  • November 26, 2009 at 1:15 am #53997
    Adam Jury

    Member

    Do you have the full version of Acrobat? Depending on the complexity of the PDF file, I find that saving it to RTF is the way to go: I'm then free to either place the RTF and clean up within InDesign, or clean up the RTF and place it.

  • November 26, 2009 at 3:50 pm #54016
    jools

    Member

    What can often help is to use Acrobat's add tags feature which is really designed for accessibility purposes but often straightens out text in the process: “Menu Advanced > Accessibility > Add Tags to Document”. After that you can copy whole chunks of text and they will (mostly) be contiguous. It's also good for when you try and copy two-column text that copies line for line from both columns.

    Just googled to see where I read this and what do I find? Anne-Marie!!

  • November 27, 2009 at 2:28 pm #54037
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Don't forget the PDF2ID plug-in from Recosoft, which is one of the easiest ways to migrate PDF information into InDesign.

  • November 27, 2009 at 5:42 pm #54038
    Aleta El Sheikh

    Participant

    I'm not surprised that multiple solutions to my problem exist. Thank you for the sugggestions!

    @Jesserenko Yes, GREP would certainly do what I want, especially if I can figure out how to keep double returns from being replaced so I won't lose the true paragraph return. A quick search has returned a few freeware text editors. I'll try them out on Monday when I'm back at my PC at work.

    @Adamjury Yes, I do have the full version of Acrobat that came in CS2. Saving it as RTF might be overkill, since I'm only copying a 1-page article in an 8-page newsletter

    @Jools I can't believe I didn't search the topic here; I usually do that before I ever post questions on forums. I have never used that accessability feature, and will give that a try as well.

    @David I am anxious to try PDF2ID and will probably get it when I upgrade, which should be soon.

    ~Aleta~

  • November 27, 2009 at 11:19 pm #54039
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    @Jesserenko Yes, GREP would certainly do what I want, especially if I can figure out how to keep double returns from being replaced so I won't lose the true paragraph return.

    Try this: (?<=[^r]) *r(?=[^r]) — replace with a single space.

    In its essence, it should search for at-left-not a return, any number of regular spaces (including none at all), a single return, at-right-not a return.

    Since copy-and-paste often introduces some space before carriage returns, you need to allow for zero or more spaces before that return.

  • November 30, 2009 at 9:38 am #54048
    Tim Hughes

    Member

    Export to rtf or word, very easy, how can that be overkill?

  • December 1, 2009 at 6:05 am #54060
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    Here's your answer, complete w/screen shots … I wrote it up for a blog post here a couple years ago:

    https://creativepro.com/cop&#8230;..design.php

    You can see me demo it if you have a subscription to Lynda.com, it's in my Acrobat 9 Tips and Tricks video title. ;-)

    AM

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