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Journal bethanie's Journal: Stupid Software Question 11

Journal by bethanie
OK, I don't often have to do this, but I have been out of the professional loop so long with software that I just don't know what's going on anymore.

I've got an Adobe Pagemaker document from somebody else that I need to edit. Unfortunately, I don't have any Adobe software (except for the free Acrobat reader). I *did* have Photoshop LE from one of my digicam software packages, but it's on the old computer and I haven't dug it out and installed it on the new machine yet. In any case, Photoshop won't do what I need to do with this thing (edit text).

What I *do* have is the Microsoft suite, and what I'd like to use is either Word or Publisher on this puppy. But neither will recognize the format [*.p65] that the file has been saved in.

Does anyone have any suggestions for what I might be able to use to open this up and do my business with it? It *was* a .pdf once upon a time, and I have that file, as well, but I don't have Adobe Acrobat proper to be able to edit it (if that's even what I need -- I don't even know anymore!).

I'd love to get this done without spending money on new software -- it's a volunteer thing that I do. Thanks for any help y'all can offer!
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  • Way low tech - but can you can copy from the PDF, paste it in OpenOffice, and save as PDF? Latest cut of OpenOffice does a pretty good job of creating PDF files these days, but it won't open a PDF for editing.

    My bride would cringe at copy/past as she works with the Adobe kit pretty regularly. Think that is pagemaker, so quark might open it... not that you had that on your list either.
  • It's a Pagemaker 6.5 document - I don't think there are any free conversion tools for Windows to convert it to much of anything. There's a tool for the Mac called 'GoClick' that will convert PageMaker (and other) documents to HTML. I do believe it's possible to obtain a fully functional version of this software to do the conversion without paying anything. The only other solution I could think of would be to find someone who has a version of PageMaker, version 6.5 or later, and have them load the document s
  • Get a copy of the .PDF.
    Get Adobe Acrobat. It's free. There's links all over the web so I won't post one here on principle.
    Go into the doc and click on the 'Text Select' button. Hint: It's not the 'Hand' or 'Magnifying Lense' button which it sits near.
    Select the text and paste it into Word or whatever.
    No. Not elegant.
    And if you have more than a couple of pages, well you're screwed (but then you knew that, didn' you?)
    Anyway, there's a free, possibly time-consuming solution.
    Alternatively, you could have th
    • This sounds like it *might* work -- it's just a one-page document, but one wrinkle is that there's a graphic on it that I need to include, too.

      Trust me, I'm willing to go pretty rustic with this one, even to the extent of re-creating the whole thing (it's not that much stuff) -- my solution up till now has been to print it out and stick *labels* with the personalized info on it. But now I'm getting into higher volume than 25 at a time, and I'm just not gonna put that kind of time into it when there's *got
      • On a windows system (I assume) you can capture the entire desktop by hitting "CTL & Print Screen". Then open your graphic app of choice and paste. To get a smaller image, use "ALT & Print Screen" This captures only the highlighted app.

        So if the graphic is displayed on your screen in an Acrobat file, you can get it. Now the quality will probably be lower, but at least you will have it.

        jason
  • 1. Contact the original content creator(s). Politely ask him/her/them for a copy of the text in a Word DOC, RTF or plain text format.

    2. Find someone who has Adobe Pagemaker or InDesign (Pagemaker's successor) installed and ask them to grab the text for you.

    3. Acquire your own copy of either Pagemaker or InDesign and grab the text yourself.

    4. If the PDF is protected and won't let you copy the text that's contained within it, print it, scan it and OCR it to get to the words.

    5. Whatever else you do, make s
    • Being Mr. Elite-Ultra-Designer-Mega-Man, for whom the girls swoon and men cower in fear*, I have InDesign 2.0 and should be able to extract the text for you -- and/or make a PDF out of it. FWIW InDesign and Illustrator can also open and edit PDFs.

      FWIW as for locked PDFs, IIRC xpdf under Linux can get around that (or better said xpdf doesn't know what a 'locked PDF' is and just ignores the lock, and is thus of course probably banned under DMCA... :-P ).

      The problem is how do you want to send it back to th

  • I have it if you get really stuck. Feel free to drop me a note at the NotMail address and I'll give you a decent address you can send it to.

    I'm not sure what else will open that format with the exception of another Adobe product. If you have a Mac, you might try the simple PageView.

    Anne

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