Re: Copy-and-paste leading spaces from PDF

Subject: Re: Copy-and-paste leading spaces from PDF
From: Shlomo Perets <shlomo2 -at- microtype -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2005 09:33:51 +0200


Gary,

You wrote:

I need the leading spaces in a FrameMaker listing of assembly code to
copy-and-paste from its PDF using a text editor without their being
truncated. How can this be done?

Assembly source-code files cannot assemble w/o error when certain types of
their statements begin in the first column of a line.


When converting a document to PDF, the original document is
no longer there (even if you converting to a Tagged PDF).
The different text selection tools in Acrobat/Reader -- Text Select,
Column Select, Table/Formatted Text Select -- produce different
variations with respect to white space/line breaks. But however you
do this, there is no guarantee that the text extracted from Acrobat/
Reader will be identical to that what you see in PDF (or originally
placed in FrameMaker). Even if there are no problems related to
font encoding/deformation, Acrobat has its own interpretation as
to what the text is.

Given this limitation, you may consider alternative approaches:

* Link to separate source files which store the code fragments
[ example: http://www.microtype.com/showcase/clip.pdf ]
This can be automated with FrameMaker's "message openfile"
hypertext marker.

* Embed the code fragments as text files in the PDF
[ example: http://www.microtype.com/showcase/EmbedTextFiles.pdf ]
End user will need Adobe [Acrobat] Reader 6 or full Acrobat to open
such embedded files or save them to disk.
In the example above, embedding was automated with TimeSavers +
custom ~embed shortcut; the FrameMaker file includes a hypertext marker
directing Distiller to embed the text file, i.e. "define once in the FM file,
distill many", without post-distilling operations.


Shlomo Perets

MicroType * http://www.microtype.com
FrameMaker/Acrobat training & consulting * FrameMaker-to-Acrobat TimeSavers/Assistants
Template Design, Single Sourcing, FM-to-PDF & Technical Indexing seminars





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