Scrambled imported text from PDF

[Kevyn53]

I've never used a publishing program in my 40 years of working with computers (mostly Macs) and an author I worked with 20 years ago wants me to update a book we did together back in the 90s. We both wrote the book on Word or wordPerfect, and Bantam Books had me send the B&W illustrations to them in a box. They scanned them, assembled the book, and sent the art back to me (some of which has been sold at Comic Book Conventions). Now the author had me do "edits" to the book, and send him the finished piece. I did the word edits, and got an "astonished " email back that the book wasn't all formatted with pictures, ready to print. Hell, I didn't assemble it, Bantam did. And they've ditched everything from the originals.

NOW, I thought Maybe, I could import the pdfs (or rtfs, or docs, or odt) files, and just tweak things a little and drop in scans of the original art and be done with the whole thing. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Not only does Publisher NOT take most of those file formats (why?) when I import the pdf version, most of the text is stacked one letter on top of the other, to a point where most of the text is solid black cubes in spots. What do I do to fix this mess? Photo 1 is what I get. Photo 2 what it's supposed to be. Same section of the book.

[walt.farrell]

You've already posted about this in the Bugs part of the forum. No need to repost here as a question, though it would be good to post these images in that topic:

Note: Your OS can make screenshots for you, and that is a much better approach than using a camera.

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[Kevyn53]

I realized that the Bugs section wasn't talking about the same thing, so I started over. I'm not having trouble exporting, I'm having trouble IMPORTING!

[Kevyn53]

Also, when I have the program open, I can't find how to take screenshots.

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, Kevyn53 said:

Also, when I have the program open, I can't find how to take screenshots.

What OS?

Have you Googled (or other search) how to take screenshots macos or how to take screenshots windows?

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, Kevyn53 said:

I realized that the Bugs section wasn't talking about the same thing, so I started over. I'm not having trouble exporting, I'm having trouble IMPORTING!

Sorry; that seemed to be what you were describing there, too.

[Kevyn53]

I figured that it wasn't on topic. I'll look at place rather than import. Also, the author has basically told me that I would have to do this project for free. I made a whopping 35 cents an hour last time. So the project is dead.

[PaulEC]

1 hour ago, Kevyn53 said:

NOW, I thought Maybe, I could import the pdfs (or rtfs, or docs, or odt) files, and just tweak things a little and drop in scans of the original art and be done with the whole thing. ... Not only does Publisher NOT take most of those file formats (why?)

It might not help now, but you should be able to open doc or odt files in MSWord or LibreOffice and export it as docx or rtf, which can be imported into Affinity Publisher. (Although you'd probably have to do some reformatting.) I have no idea why Affinity didn't make things easier and allow import of these other file formats!