Eureka! (Maybe.)

[quasigeostrophy]

That is, unless anyone has a better suggestion.

I have this several-page application for another fellowship through the American Meteorological Society. It's an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) document. There are spaces for writing essay answers to a few questions, and the instructions indicate to use the space provided, not a separate sheet. I don't have access to a typewriter, and no Word doc or similar version is available. I have the full version of Acrobat, but adding large chunks of text to an existing document doesn't seem to work very well. Exporting from Acrobat to a Word doc version completely mucks up the formatting. I just had a brainstorm and tried to open the PDF in Adobe InDesign (the successor to PageMaker) - no go. Won't even read it.

So, I thought, just for the hell of it, to try to open it in PhotoShop CS. It worked! I have to throw a new layer of white underneath each page as the white of the paper is imported into PS as transparent, but that's easily done. One thing I don't like, though, is that, when I print from there, the existing text looks fuzzy. I tried importing at 72 dpi and 300 dpi and it didn't seem to make a difference - PS must import the text as rasterized rather than as vectors. If I have to do it this way, though, at least my own text that I add in PS will be sharp.

Anyone have any alternative suggestions?

Comments

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

If you have access to a linux box, see if kword will import it - it has a PDF import feature, though I'm not sure how complete it is.

[d-h.livejournal.com]

The only thing that will do a perfect job of giving you a completely editable pdf is Illustrator (it will keep the text as text so stops it being fuzzy). Illustrators native format has basically been PDF for several versions. But you can only work on (open) one page of a PDF at a time in Illustrator so for multi-page documents you then need to recombine modified and saved pages using Acrobat. What they should have done is set aside text form areas in the PDF so anyone with Reader or the full version of Acrobat could enter text in the spaces. Another alternative with the full version of Acrobat is to use the textbox tool (I think it's called) to define an area on the layer over the pdf that you can enter text. You can then use properties to format the area.

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

I have the full version of Acrobat 6, and I'm not finding anything like a textbox tool - there's a touch-up text tool and a comment/annotations tool, but even the help file seems to refer the user to the original application for adding large text sections. I'd totally forgotten about Illustrator, though - thanks for the suggestion!

[d-h.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of the text annotation tool (http://www.planetpdf.com/enterprise/article.asp?contentid=6042&ra)