I really need to export text

[Arte]

7 hours ago, PaoloT said:

This sounds a lot like a nightmare!

There is no need to use OCR, when you have an unprotected PDF from where you can export plain text by just copying & pasting.

Sending text to translators and getting it back – without then having to assemble text in unreadable languages, and reapply all the styles – is another matter. And the only way is to be able to export tagged text, that Publisher can then recognize and reassemble automatically.

Paolo

 

Sorry the reply was meant for @LostInTranslation but the reason I suggested OCR is that it may be able to "repair" paragraphs broken into single lines because it recognizes the paragraph blocks. Some software I use simply generates single line paragraphs and the OCR software reasonably often manages to recognize paragraph blocks and converts it as such.

But I agree with you regarding being able to export/import tagged text would be the way to go. Thought I don't really expect that to happen anytime soon. Plain text or formatted (RTF) text support maybe, tagged text would be a bonus surprise I guess.

[Arte]

2 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Catalogues are always going to be a nightmare for translation unless there is pretty much exclusive use of Databases and / or Spreadsheets for the information. The translation would be done in the Spreadsheet and then that would be imported via Data Merge.

 

@Old Bruce is correct imho. Or use software like FrameMaker, but for catalogs a database would probably be used at the backend anyway but FrameMaker has the tools to handle that. However... it also costs an awful lot more than Publisher. If database connectivity is an option Viva Designer might be an option to consider for just catalogs, still more expensive than Publisher but considerably less expensive than FrameMaker or InDesign.

I don't want to think about how much time a 600+ page catalog would take to translate into multiple languages in Publisher without at least the option for export/import of tagged text. Just the text reflow that may occur might be enough for causing some (or massive) headaches.

[Old Bruce]

51 minutes ago, Arte said:

Just the text reflow that may occur might be enough for causing some (or massive) headaches.

I am relatively fluent in English only, but having been born and raised in Canada I am well aware that French takes more space than English on breakfast cereal boxes and income tax forms.

[LostInTranslation]

To put things in perspective, the catalogues in question are 8, 12 and 16 pages.
No need for database-driven content in this case (although it would be very nice to have it)

Meanwhile, I got the quote from the translators. 
It seems, they will translate directly from the PDF. That's good in this case, but still I really need text-export of documents.

[pruus]

Take a look at Libre Office, Windows and Mac. Ik have seen that I can do more with pdf’s. It’s worth trying, free software. Import pdf and export in different file format is possible. 

[Fixx]

On 12/13/2021 at 8:30 PM, Arte said:

the reason I suggested OCR is that it may be able to "repair" paragraphs broken into single lines because it recognizes the paragraph blocks. Some software I use simply generates single line paragraphs and the OCR software reasonably often manages to recognize paragraph blocks and converts it as such.

Different PDF tools handle this differently. I have apps that create OK paragraphs, with simple copy paste. Now, hyphenation is worse problem... that must be corrected with search-replace one by one (replace all would remove also rightly used hyphens).

[LostInTranslation]

1 hour ago, pruus said:

Take a look at Libre Office, Windows and Mac. Ik have seen that I can do more with pdf’s. It’s worth trying, free software. Import pdf and export in different file format is possible. 

Hey, cool tip, thank you.
I am using Open Office and it does not seem to be able to do that.

Got Libre Office now and it can open PDFs. For some reason, even if I open them inside LibreWriter, they open in LibreDraw. And from there I don't find a way to save as .doc
However, "Preview in Browser" is a pretty good option. It gives more or less plain text.

Do you know how to really open PDFs in WRITER instead of Draw and then export as .doc?

EDIT: Draw treats every text line as a single object and as such "hardcodes" linebreaks. Preview in Browser gives lots of single paragraphs.
I hope there's a way to really open it in Writer and treat it as a text document.

[PaulEC]

20 minutes ago, LostInTranslation said:

Do you know how to really open PDFs in WRITER instead of Draw and then export as .doc?

Open Writer, go to File > Open. In the file type drop down choose the "PDF - Portable Document Format (Writer)" option. Choose the file you want to open, you can then save as a .doc file.

Warning: You may find that the PDF displays differently in Writer to how it does in Draw!

[LostInTranslation]

19 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

Open Writer, go to File > Open. In the file type drop down choose the "PDF - Portable Document Format (Writer)" option. Choose the file you want to open, you can then save as a .doc file.

Warning: You may find that the PDF displays differently in Writer to how it does in Draw!

Thank you, that works.
But only if I specifically choose PDF from the dropdown-box. Opening the same file without explicitly chosing PDF opens Draw. Very strange.

That said, it works now like you said.

Small problem though, text lines are still single objects. I believe this is carried over from the PDF.
Is there a way to export to PDF, so the text-flow stays intact?

[William Overington]

4 hours ago, LostInTranslation said:

Meanwhile, I got the quote from the translators. 
It seems, they will translate directly from the PDF. That's good in this case, but still I really need text-export of documents.

So you send them a PDF document, they display it, read it and translate.

How does the process proceed from there please?

For example, will they send you a text file with the translated text and you then use copy and paste to edit a copy of the Affinity Publisher file?

Will the text file that they send to you be in Unicode or in an old 8-bit codespace format?

William

 

[LostInTranslation]

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

So you send them a PDF document, they display it, read it and translate.

How does the process proceed from there please?

For example, will they send you a text file with the translated text and you then use copy and paste to edit a copy of the Affinity Publisher file?

Will the text file that they send to you be in Unicode or in an old 8-bit codespace format?

William

 

Usually they send Word-files in Unicode, which I copy/paste one by one word, sentence or paragraph.
Veeery tiresome, but luckily there ist not an awful lot of text on most pages.

Translation of the new website will follow early net year. I will try to convince the translators to use my online-interface for translations. If they don't, I can always export all text in a structured manner from the database.

I wish it were that easy in Designer ...

[PaoloT]

Translation workflows are the most varied around. Some are really odd. Not long ago, a translator asked me to export a 200-pages InDesign project to Illustrator files, one file per page, and she would have done her work on those files. My colleagues in that country told me that she wasn't asking me something particularly strange.

I was not happy to have to choose a different translator, since she was considered a good one, and was trusted by the distributor. But translation adds a lot to the overall times and costs of a project, and we simply couldn't afford to add unnecessary expenses to an already high bill. For this reason, I eagerly await for Serif to add the features needed to make file interchange a lot easier.

Paolo

 

[TheOtherRoland]

The OP asked for someone from the company to comment, but no one has. I can't blame them. I think this text issue is a sticking point with many people who are wondering "How do I export a tab-delineated index page out of APub?" only to realize that it's not possible to do so.

In fact, I've read advice from various sources on the internet for procedures that I can't engage because of this one limitation. Not being a coder, I don't know how difficult it is to add this feature to APub. But I think it would make a lot of us happier.

However, you can copy and paste directly from APub into rtf format and work with it there. However, there are often "gremlins" from program to program when copy/pasting, so the work is never as clean as it ought to be.

My kingdom (if I had one) for proper text export. :)

[v_kyr]

That would be for sure a useful addon feature to have, exporting all images and all contained text then in a plain exchangable text format.

In the meantime one has to try out some third party PDF tools as workarounds which allow to extract all text from PDFs here. - Possible things for tryouts would be here ...

• Xpdf pdftotext
• Xpdf tools download
• Ghostscript    Usage: "gs9550w64 -sDEVICE=txtwrite -o output.txt input.pdf"
• Ghostscript GitHub
• Install ghostscript on Mac OSX
• PDFxStream
• Apache PDFBox
• Convert PDF to Text (Online via OCR)
• ... etc. ...