Importing pdf into Publisher

[jboone]

I have seen that the only method for getting my old technical book that I have been working on for many years is to import it the new publisher is to bring it in as a pdf.  That present a serious problem for me as the text is broken up into single line text and small groups that have no bearing for the some 25 chapters I had started this project with.  I didn't notice any methods for importing  chapters as a final book from directories that seperated the chapters either.

Is there any way we can select text and have it brought into a topic group with its proper text and styles?

[Chris_K]

HI jboone

As PDF is generally a final output format, text is not preserved in it i n the same way as having a text frame in a native application is. Therefore when we import a PDF we have to estimate what is text and how it is represented. The team has tried to create text styles from text imported in PDFs but it has not been as successful as they would like so it is not included yet. There is an option on the import dialog that allows you to group lines of text into a single frame but this is also a best guess scenario. 

You may be able to get most of the way there from the import alone but it is going to require some tweaking after to get it to look exactly the way you'd want it I;m afraid. Even other apps like Acrobat break the text into individual blocks for a similar reason

Cheers

[jboone]

Well then let me say this.  I use Autocad and someone wrote a macro that allows users to select a bunch of individual text and splice them together as one paragraph.  Yes, even if the string of text were before separated by a paragraph marker, I realize this would be impossible to detect, so stringing any selected text together would be the only option available and later the user would have to put a carriage return in the string to make it a paragraph.  So given this is our only option to import from the old page plus books or chapters, I can't see it would be much help to me to make this book viable to publish for how ever many years.

I am asking for the text I have selected to be brought in as a text frame to lesson the drudgery of importing 225 pages of existing page plus work I have spend years developing.

As a side note I tried to import the text frames from page plus 9 and it only imported as single line text, split and oriented to the same positions it was placed on the page of page plus.  This too is an impossible work flow to make my book work with the new publish.  The text was copy pasted from x9 to publish and the text font was also shrunk and squashed so the font didn't look any similar to what was in x9.

[dominik]

23 hours ago, jboone said:

That present a serious problem for me as the text is broken up into single line text and small groups that have no bearing for the some 25 chapters I had started this project with.

Hello @jboone,

I imported quite successfully text from an RTF file via copy and paste. It preserves text styles and was a good start to work on the text. This is not a way to import the original layout but much better than PDF.

It is also possible to import RTF via 'Text > Insert Text from File...'.

Switching a layout program always brings some extra work with it, especially if the layout is a little complex.

Cheers,
d.

Edited October 24, 2018 by dominik
Added 'import RTF'

[jboone]

Thanks dominik but my main problem is trying to get text out of pageplus 9.  I heard that the only method for doing it is to export it as pdf then bring it in that way.  There are a lot of images in my tech guide with 250 pages which I have been working since 2011.  It breaks the text in ways that will make it impossible to get any good length of text out.  As I discover, there are also bugs with bringing text by copy or past methods either and try to keep any semblance of formatting.  Can you recommend a method for extracting out of pageplus?

[dominik]

1 hour ago, jboone said:

Can you recommend a method for extracting out of pageplus?

I've never used PagePlus.

I want to emphasize (in my opinion) that switching from one layout program (like PagePlus) to another one (like Affinity Publisher) there will always be problems in the transformation process.

At the moment there is no method for extracting a complete layout out of PagePlus. And I assume there never will be.

Also, please take into account, Affinity Publisher is in it's beta version. We have to look at and take what is available at the moment.

As we are in the 'bugs' section of the forum. I don't think this is a bug but rather a topic better posted in the Discussions and Suggestions for Affinity Publisher Beta on Desktop forum.

Cheers 
d.

[Alfred]

3 hours ago, jboone said:

It breaks the text in ways that will make it impossible to get any good length of text out.  As I discover, there are also bugs with bringing text by copy or past methods either and try to keep any semblance of formatting.  Can you recommend a method for extracting out of pageplus?

The best way would be to allow us to import native *.stt files saved from WritePlus, but unfortunately we don’t currently have such a facility in the Affinity apps and it doesn’t look as though it’s going to be added any time soon.