Importing Multiple PDFS

[Maybelle]

Hello, I am new here. I am trying to get consistent formatting  for all the books my company carries. I have word docs/PDFs of books that are hundreds of pages long, but when I import them the formatting gets messed up and I have to go in page by page to reformat, even the page numbers don't stay in a consistent place. Not only will this be time consuming to have to format each page individually, but then how would I keep the formatting consistent. Is there a way to import a, say, 300 page PDF and have every page be the same?

[wonderings]

Publisher is not good for this at the moment if the PDF uses fonts that are not loaded on your computer already. To some this is a feature as you get an editable PDF in Publisher, to others like myself this is a huge flaw and one of the big reasons Publisher is not ready for pro production work. You cannot add in a PDF without it trying to make fonts editable, no PDF pass through. You have a few options, none that I really like but could get the job done if you must. You can rasterize the PDF's and just have a ton of jpegs. The other option that does not suffer any quality loss is outlining all the fonts. You can do this in Acrobat DC (pro version of Acrobat, not available in free reader).

Best solution in my opinion is Indesign. I use a plugin in Indesign called multipage importer. It is a really handy tool for importing and positioning all PDF's in a document the same. Sorry no solution for you with Publisher. 

[Alfred]

26 minutes ago, wonderings said:

To some this is a feature as you get an editable PDF in Publisher

It shouldn’t be either/or! Serif PagePlus had passthrough added quite a few years after gaining the ability to interpret embedded fonts when opening PDFs. In fact, I don’t remember PP ever going through a phase of being able to open PDFs without interpreting the fonts.

[Maybelle]

I don't know about fonts, its basic fonts in my document. The issue is that the formatting get messed up like the text will be centered on one page and the page number is on the bottom center and then the next page will have the text all the way to the right with he page number further up on the page.

 

[wonderings]

16 minutes ago, Maybelle said:

I don't know about fonts, its basic fonts in my document. The issue is that the formatting get messed up like the text will be centered on one page and the page number is on the bottom center and then the next page will have the text all the way to the right with he page number further up on the page.

 

There are embedded fonts in your PDF. Publisher wants to make it editable and by doing so things are getting messed up because the font is not installed on your computer. Not sure how this works or why it is happening if you are using standard fronts from Microsoft Office on the same computer as the fonts should have been installed to your OS when he software was.

If this was Indesign you would place the PDF's in a document and you would see exactly what you saw in your PDF viewer, it is not editable. Now if you are importing a Word file itself to have the ability to edit it then there is no real perfect solution to important and maintain all your settings and formatting perfectly. 

What is the end result you are hoping to achieve? Are you wanting to have all these files converted to Publisher so you can edit and adjust them in Publisher itself?

 

[Old Bruce]

On 8/31/2020 at 9:10 AM, Maybelle said:

Hello, I am new here. I am trying to get consistent formatting  for all the books my company carries. I have word docs/PDFs of books that are hundreds of pages long....

Your best bet is to import/Place the Word Docs in a new Publisher Document. (Just use the PDFs to look at.) Then you can set up a series of Paragraph Styles and Character Styles and put those into a Template which will allow you to place the Word Documents (saved as .DOCX) and apply the styles.

Are these books mostly text or do  they have many illustrations and or tables and charts. Without knowing we are (by which I mean I am) likely to confuse you much more than help you. A couple of screenshots of typical pages would help out.

[wonderings]

1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

Your best bet is to import/Place the Word Docs in a new Publisher Document. (Just use the PDFs to look at.) Then you can set up a series of Paragraph Styles and Character Styles and put those into a Template which will allow you to place the Word Documents (saved as .DOCX) and apply the styles.

Are these books mostly text or do  they have many illustrations and or tables and charts. Without knowing we are (by which I mean I am) likely to confuse you much more than help you. A couple of screenshots of typical pages would help out.

I think part of the issue is she wants to import without anything changing formatting wise. I do not think that is possible. You may get things close but I double it will just be a perfect copy of what you see in Word.