Copy Text Boxes from Acrobat to InDesign

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    • #81863
      Justine Dowsing
      Participant

      Hi,
      I have an ecologist client who has drawn a thousand reptile records in text boxes in Acrobat on an aerial photo pdf. I now need to recreate this in InDesign. When I open the pdf in Illustrator the text boxes disappear. Is there a quick way to pull all the frames and text across so that I can quickly go round and assign paragraph and object styles without individually going round and copying and pasting the text from each of the 1000 boxes.
      Thanks
      Justine

    • #81866
      Kelly Vaughn
      Participant

      Oh, man. That’s a tough one. Because the text boxes are comments in the PDF, they, as you have discovered, will not be in the PDF when you open it in Illustrator. But you can use a Flattener script (on your PDF in Acrobat) that will flatten your comments so they’ll no longer be comments, but rather, part of the main body of the PDF. Then when you open the file in Illustrator, they will be there. But, since you’ve opened PDFs in Illustrator before, you’re likely familiar with the fact that Illustrator often breaks up the text into bits and pieces, making it much more difficult to edit.

      Is there a particular reason you need to add the callouts in InDesign? Because Illustrator also has paragraph styles and may be a better choice for this project.

      Regarding the content of the comments, there is way to export all of them out as an FDF file. That’s basically a type of XML file. I wrote about that here: https://creativepro.com/working-with-fdfs-forms-data-files/

      A scripter can probably write a script that will extract just the information you need (the contents of the text boxes), and get rid of all the other stuff. Just two days I saw that type of script in action. Once all your text is extracted, it would be fairly straightforward to go in and apply the styles you need. Here is the contact information of the scripture was can help you: https://frameautomation.com/about/

    • #81867
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      Justine, it sounds like those notes are “annotations” in the PDF. I don’t know if Illustrator can read annotations. You might consider using a tool like PDF2ID from Recosoft to open the PDF in InDesign. Not sure it would work, but worth a try!

    • #81873

      Occam’s Razor here, have you tried exporting to Word Doc, Rich Text or Plain Text?

    • #82067
      Effie Latif
      Member

      I have saved as plain text file, it did saved all annotations with one exception, you have to save one page at a time, just save annotation only for page in front.
      thanks Colleen for suggestion.

    • #82068
      Justine Dowsing
      Participant

      Hi All,
      Thanks for your suggestions. I’m going to try Effie’s method one page at a time and see if I can get that working for me.
      Justine

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