I am trying to be pioneering, and be the first person at my university to deposit electronically (well, they told me I was the first. Sounds kind of hard to believe). This means that I have to get the whole thing–defense form, preliminary pages, body, references, appendices, vita, and abstract, into one single .pdf file.
I spent yesterday wrangling with the format and trying to get the page numbers right (preliminary pages have to be numbered with lowercase roman numerals, the body with regular numbers, and there are a few random pages that are neither numbered nor counted as pages…). I finally have that problem solved. New problem? The defense form, which is available only as a .pdf document. I need to make this one-page document into the very first page of my dissertation file.
How do I do this? Does Adobe Acrobat do this? I have Acrobat Distiller, but not the full-blown Acrobat, which is why I’m asking. I also have Microsoft Word, which is what I constructed my document with.
I believe that there is a more expensive version that can actually process pdfs. However, have you thought of scanning in the form and turning it into a word file, or even an image at a pinch?
Ugh. Add to the problem that I can’t fill out the form–when the document is open in Acrobat Reader, I can type in my information fine, but there is NO way to save it.
I knew I was in for trouble when the format people couldn’t even follow their own format correctly.
Well, the full version of Acrobat will combine files and allow you to save a file with the form fields filled in, but there is a way to do it with just Distiller.
That’s an article about how to make Distiller take more than one PostScript file as input so that it makes one PDF of them.
You’ll need to print the form file and the rest of the dissertation each into a .ps file. Since you’ve gotten that far before, I’ll assume you know how to make your print driver make the files.
Or, somewhere in your University there must be a copy of the Acrobat that edits (it used to be Acrobat Exchange, but now I don’t know if it has its own name).
I’ve got the full Acrobat version and know the program pretty well. If you get desperate and don’t mind sharing the document with a stranger — although I’m sure SD Mod SkipMagic would vouch for me — I can help.
But you’ll have to be a little more specific on what you’re trying to accomplish, I’m not sure if I fully grok what you’re attempting from this thread alone.
Campus computers do indeed have the full version of Acrobat, so I guess I am going there tomorrow (shudders at thought of navigating the road construction) to work on a lab computer.
What I need to do is this:
Fill out a form that is in .pdf format
Add the form to the beginning of my dissertation, also in .pdf format (though I have it in Word too).
Basically, modify one .pdf file, then make it and another .pdf into only one .pdf.
The easiest way I can see is to fill out the form in Acrobat, print the filled out form to a .ps file. Open .ps file in Word, copy and paste to the begining of your dissertation. Print to the Acrobat printer (PDFWriter).
Not sure how the formatting will hold up under the conversions. I remember having problems with the PDFWriter driver when we used it for some stuff.
The full version (Acrobat Professional) will allow you to enter text and retain it because it allows you to save changes.
Open your dissertation in Acrobat Professional and go to Document > Insert Pages. A dialog box will appear and ask you to find the file (the form you filled out). Then it asks where you want to insert the page: “Before” “First” page.
Dunno about the form part, but Hey you! is exactly right about adding the one page form .pdf (when you get it) to the front of your existing .PDF. You will need the full professional Acrobat version to do this, however. But it’s easy-peasy.
The way to retain form data without a copy of Acrobat Pro, is to save the data as an .FDF file. This file when opened in combination with the original .PDF form will populate the form fields with your data.
It works pretty well, I sent out some data collection forms by email and recieved back .fdf files which were considerably smaller than the original .pdf files I sent out.
So whilst you can’t save changes directly to the form in Acrobat Reader, you can save your inputs, you just have to do so in a different file format.
Does Word format .ps files when opened - or do they show up as text? I’ve written Perl scripts to extract data from .ps files, but it would be very useful if the formatting was preserved. I’m going to have to try this tonight.
Why people supply forms that should be machine readable as pdfs is beyond me. It’s easy to do it as a .xls file with non-open areas locked.