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Posted by Tim Cole at 11:22 AM | Permalink

I'm attending the combined InDesign, Acrobat and Vector conferences this week in Miami Beach. Today I spoke with Paramjit Chadha, Managing Director of Recosoft, the company that developed the very cool PDF2ID product.

What It Is PDF2ID is an InDesign plug-in that enables users to extract content from a PDF file and put it in an InDesign document that matches the PDF as closely as possible. PDF2ID is a valuable utility to have in your tool chest because of its ability to extract the content of a PDF file and make educated guesses about the original source document's layout--and this is a non-trivial task. PDF files don't contain all the layout information of an InDesign document.

PDF is a compact file format that doesn't contain data constructs like threaded text frames, for example. What PDF2ID is doing is analyzing the content of a PDF and then based on the nature of the objects and their relationships, constructs a layout from those objects in a new InDesign file. Their website describes it this way:

PDF2ID extracts text to form lines, then groups the lines to make paragraphs; applies text fonts and styles such as bold and underline where possible; regroups independent graphic elements; and creates tables. Furthermore, it performs contextual analytics so that related data are correlated and remain together.

Paramjit likes comparing a PDF file to a fully cooked beef stew. PDF2ID's purpose is to try to extract all the stew's ingredients in their original, uncooked state...so that the cook can start over again and repurpose them.

What It Is Not PDF2ID is not a round tripping tool that you would expect to recreate the layout of a PDF file exactly just to make minor edits and then export it back to PDF. Neither is it a PDF file editor. Their website puts it this way: Rather, the primary scope and objective of PDF2ID is to provide a seamless and transparent mechanism for PDF data recovery and reuse within InDesign. To achieve this, PDF2ID does its best to preserve the layout while reconstructing data along with the respective property and elements wherever possible.

PDF2ID is also not a hacker's tool. If a PDF file has embedded security to prevent the unauthorized extraction of data, PDF2ID will require a user to enter that password in order to perform the extraction process.

What It's Good For

PDF2ID is an invaluable tool to have at your disposal when you've got to redesign or repurpose PDF content for which you don't have the original source files. Or suppose you've got some old FreeHand files that you'd like to migrate to InDesign...you can convert them to PDF and then use PDF2ID to extract and format the content as closely as possible to the original source in a new, fully editable InDesign file.

Typical PDF2ID customers are designers, freelancers, IT departments and service providers who need the ability to do this kind of extraction for their customer or colleagues.

I've used PDF2ID many times, and I've been impressed with how well it does what it's intended to do. If your expecations are realisitc, you'll be pleased as well.

I asked Paramjit about the task of doing data extraction from a PDF. Not all PDF's are created equal. There are so many different PDF generating applications available today, that being able to parse and interpret them correctly takes a lot of study and experimentation.

PDF2ID can also be limited by the PDF version, and if the PDF is flattened. If you're creating your PDF's using PDF 1.3, or if you're distilling PostScript, then you've got a flattened PDF. This can be an issue if you're trying to extract content from a document that contains transparency. Because neither PDF 1.3, nor PostScript support transparent objects, a design with transparency will be flattened to conform to the limitations of those file types. This can mean that text or vector objects are turned to raster (image) datat, or text might be converted to outlines. When PDF2ID finds these types of flattened objects, it can only extract the raster data in the PDF and drop it into your InDesign file.

For this reason, unflattened PDF's (1.4 and higher) directly exported from InDesign and Illustrator are likely to give you far better extraction results than flattened PDF if those files contain transparency effects. Be aware that if you're creating PDF via PostScript, you're creating a flattened PDF.

If this kind of content extraction sounds like it might be useful to you, check out Recosoft's website and give PDF2ID a look. You can download trial versions of their software here.

Posted by Tim Cole at 09:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by Tim Cole at 07:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Installing the Layout Zone script:

• Unzip the script and put the Layout Zones folder in the root level of InDesign's Scripts folder.

• Don't put it in the Scripts Panel folder, because you run this script from InDesign's Edit menu. Developer Martinho da Gloria took advantage of InDesign's ability to enable a script to added to an actual application menu, so you don't have to run the script from InDesign's Scripts Panel.

Using the Layout Zone script:

• Select some the page objects that you want to convert to a placed InDesign file.
• Note that the placed InDesign file is a single object on a single layer, so keep that in mind when you decide what objects to select.
• Go to Edit > Layout Zone > Objects To InDesign Document to run the script. The first thing you'll see is this dialog box:

• You have the choice of converting just your selected objects or all the objects on a page that you specify.
• You can choose to Ignore locked objects in the conversion. If you don't choose one of those options, then all objects, even locked will be part of the conversion.
• You can also choose to not replace the objects with your newly created ID document. The new document is still saved and editable, just not placed in your current layout. This is useful if you just want to duplicate something you've created for someone else to use.
• The script gives you options for dealing with strokes, or hanging punctuation, ascenders and descenders. The Ignore option is straightforward. Include In Page and Include As Bleed are two ways of accommodating content that exists outside the bounding box of the frames in which they reside. The former tries to calculate how much extra space those items need automatically (which is an educated guess...InDesign doesn't provide that information to the script) and expand the new document size beyond the bounding box of the selected objects. The latter does the same thing but uses InDesign's bleed settings to accomplish this. In both cases you can add extra bleed amounts manually if the situation requires it. Examples of objects to be accommodated would be text descenders that hang down past the bottom edge of a text frame, strokes that are drawn whole or in part outside the bounding box of a frame, hanging punctuation, etc.
• The script will then bring up a save dialog box asking where you want your new InDesign document to be saved. Once it saves it replaces your selected objects with the newly created InDesign document (assuming you didn't uncheck the box).
• The script does a good job of preserving things like baseline grid settings, either on the document level or frame based grids...this is essential to keep your text from shifting and possibly recomposing in your newly created ID document.
• At this point the new document can be edited by another user or by you. Opt/alt + double-click on the placed ID file will open the file for editing in another document window.

Converting Back to InDesign Objects

• One of the greatest things about this script is that it enables you to convert a placed InDesign file back into native InDesign objects.
• To do that, select the placed InDesign file, and then Edit > Layout Zone > Linked InDesign Page to Objects. That will bring up this dialog box:

• This dialog gives you options for how you want the new native InDesign objects to be managed.
• Check the Use Original Layers Order to preserve object layer assignments in the placed InDesign document.
• Choose As a Group to have the objects created as an InDesign group.
• Choose Paste Into Selected Frame if you've cropped the placed InDesign file and want to preserve that arrangement (very cool feature).
• The script will preserve basic transformations like rotation and shearing that's been applied to the placed InDesign file. That said, I think it will be easy to create transformations that will cause the script to fail. Experiment with the script a bit before you rely on it in a live production scenario.

Martinho da Gloria has done a great job putting together a very useful script that automates steps that otherwise would be pretty tedious to perform manually. Give his website a look and remember him if and when you need some custom plug-ins or other InDesign consulting work done.

Note: The first released version of this script won't load in non-English menus. Martinho is currently testing a new version that will do that, so stay tuned.

Posted by Tim Cole at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today Martinho da Gloria of Automatication is releasing the first version of a script that enables a use to select InDesign page elements and convert them to a placed InDesign file automatically.

The script enables a workflow in which different InDesign users can work on different sections of the same page simultaneously.

In addition, the script also enables the user to convert the placed InDesign file back to native objects...in other words, it enables you to "round trip" the page elements into a placed InDesign file and back to native elements again.

When you install the script, it creates a new Layout Zone submenu in InDesign's Edit menu, which means you don't have to open your Scripts panel to use it.

I did a demo this morning for the attendees at this week's combined InDesign, Vector, and Acrobat Conferences in Miami Beach.

InDesign CS3 enables a user to import or place another InDesign document onto a page, and this script takes that feature one step further by enabling the user to define a geometry within an InDesign document, and then essentially export that geometry as a new, linked InDesign document that someone else can edit. This is great for defining the frame size for an ad within InDesign, and then exporting that frame for someone else to build the actual ad that will be placed into that frame. The same thing goes for a story or article on a spread that requires another user to do the layout. Just create some place-holder frames for the article and then run the script to convert it into a placed InDesign file that another user will open and edit.

The script is available on the InDesign Secrets website.

I'll be posting a more in-depth step-by-step article on the script later today, but wanted to alert users to its availability immediately.

The main issue that has arisen in testing the script so far has been occasional stacking order changes when a place document is converted back to native objects. The version distributed on InDesign Secrets appears to have fixed this issue. If further updates are required, Martinho will send them to InDesign Secrets for distribution.

This is a very cool and very useful script. If you work in a collaborative environment you should give it a try.

Posted by Tim Cole at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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