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• • August 22, 2020 at 2:24 pm #126669
    Paul A

    Member

    Hello everyone!
    Glad to have found this excellent forum!
    First, a little background on the problem. I am striving to keep this explanation as concise as possible:
    This is my 6th book project using ID, and I would consider myself intermediate in skill-level. I am working with the author to make corrections in this current project, and, as a result of miscommunication, he made them all inside a PDF proof copy of the complete text using Acrobat DC (wanted him to use it to highlight errors/corrections to be made along with notes). He made all the corrects within the PDF only, and not in a revised copy of the original Word file manuscript. As such, I had to remove all the line numbers I had in place for reference on the left and right outermost margins of the document, and then render a .Doc file. I also copied all text from the PDF with formatting into a .Doc, ODT, and .Docx files for the following reason.
    When attempting to place the .Doc file I exported from AcroD into ID, the text only reflowed the first few pages, and wouldn’t produce anything but blank pages after clicking on the red x at the lower right hand side of the last page reflowed. After clicking on the red x and creating a new spread and reflowing the text, I get nothing but more blank pages.
    Failing this, I attempted to use the .Doc I copied and pasted from AcroDC, along with the ODT and .Docx files, again with the same results. Finally, out of desperation, I copied all the text with formatting from AcroDC into Wordpad and saved it as an RTF file and placed it into ID. It reflowed less than half of the text, but did seem to keep formatting intact.
    —————————————————————————————————–
    At the moment, I am completely stumped as how to solve this problem, and we are approaching our initial deadline for this project for release as an e-book on a private membership website (2 days away). Ideally, don’t want to have the author have to make all his corrections over again in a copy of his original manuscript file, and I am totally unable to make all the corrections myself to the existing ID project which contains the full manuscript layed out well.
    Any feedback, suggestions, etc are greatly appreciated!
    Thank you =)

  • August 23, 2020 at 8:49 am #126672
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Did you try importing the Acrobat changes with File > Import PDF Comments?
    Or are you saying that he actually edited the text inside the PDF file? That would be bad.
    When you see the blank pages, did you look inside Edit > Edit with Story Editor? That would tell you if the text is really there, but not showing up.

  • August 23, 2020 at 10:55 am #126673
    Paul A

    Member

    Unfortunately, it’s the latter– edits were made inside the PDF file, much to my dismay.
    Thank for you the tip about using the Story Editor, David.
    Update: I was finally able to import copy of the formatted text from the edit PDF into a .Doc file, and was able to successfully place the text into the document. Did my level best to import the text with style mapping that mirrors the paragraph styles I defined prior to this mess, and now have to go through the entire text again and left indent paragraphs, in addition to myriad other corrections–a hard lesson learned about communication.
    Not to derail this post topic too far, is there a way to streamline changing paragraph styles from the text being placed, to the ones I’ve pre-defined? Otherwise, it appears I will have to manually change each section. The obstacle is the way.
    PS. Thank you for all the excellent work you are doing for the world of InDesign, David! I’ve learned a lot from watching many of your videos on Lynda.com, along with those of Ann Marie Concepcion, and Nigel French. Hats off to you!

  • August 23, 2020 at 10:57 am #14331370
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I’m so glad our work has been useful for you, and I’m so sorry to hear this job has turned into a nightmare. Sigh.
    This might help?
    https://indesignsecrets.com/solving-word-workflow-problems-with-style-mapping.php

  • August 23, 2020 at 1:55 pm #126675
    Paul A

    Member

    Thanks for this link. Will see what I can glean from it.

  • August 24, 2020 at 10:36 am #126678
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    Another thing you could try, if you have a version of the PDF before the author made changes, would be to compare the PDFs to each other in Acrobat. That should give you a text-to-text comparison of what changed so you would only have to change the things the author changed instead of reflowing the whole document.
    https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acrobat/how-to/compare-two-pdf-files.html

    • August 28, 2020 at 8:37 am #126736
      Paul A

      Member

      You are a SAVIOR, as this is exactly the remedy I needed! Thank you for sharing this, Aaron!

    • August 28, 2020 at 12:03 pm #126743
      Aaron Troia

      Participant

      No problem, I’m glad it worked! I work at a publishing house and I think we actually ran into this same issue a few weeks ago.

  • August 29, 2020 at 11:47 am #126745
    Paul A

    Member

    Indeed! Thanks to your tip, this project has suddenly become incredibly easier. Cheers!

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