Best route from PDF back to FrameMaker?

Question

Hello,
I have a 300 page user guide, originally created in Frame (typical stuff - dozen or so chapters, loads of cross-references, nicely formatted in a dozen or so paragraph styles, a fair sprinkling of screenshots).
The Frame source files have been lost, they are gone for good. All that's left is the PDF.
Now of course, the user guide needs some substantial updating :)
If you were the poor guy tasked with sorting this one out, what would you try to get it back into Frame?
I have Frame8 and Acrobat Professional 8 on WinXP (and access to Adobe CS1 and MS Office 2003).
For a laugh, I tried exporting the PDF from Acrobat as "Word 2003" format, then importing that into Frame.
It crashed so bad that Windows launched Dr Watson. And then Dr Watson crashed LOL
Any thoughts/experience/wisdom/hilarious anecdotes from the list would be appreciated...

Answer 1

Hi,
I don't know if this is still an active discussion or not, but here's my two cents' worth:
I'm with Mike and Riley: I'd never try to import another file format into Frame (other than graphics formats, of course), especially not anything like Word or RTF. I've seen way too many files become corrupt and unopenable or unusable/printable, etc., because someone tried to cut corners and use one of the half-baked cross-document conversion capabilities (even Adobe's own tools and Acrobat plug-ins, etc.). Assuming you find a stable way to do it, you'll spend more time experimenting and coming up with a fast work flow than you would spend just redoing the book from scratch/ascii.
Something like this:
1. Export the PDF to ASCII.
2. Open the PDF pages with screenshots in Illustrator to steal the images (somebody else mentioned this too) and save them as JPGs or whatever you prefer (or that html export trick sounds pretty cool, but I've never tried it).
3. Create or open your Frame template.
4. Paste the entire text flow into the Frame body template. If the document was well designed, everything should be in the right order, if not, you may need to watch for things being out of order. In any case, callouts from graphics will likely be in a weird order.
5. Apply paragraphs and formats using the PDF as a reference.
6. Recreate tables (there may be ways to speed this process if you have a lot of them.
7. Create graphics frames and import your screens
8. Use search/replace to find the old cross-references and redo them all.
If you had 10 books to do, I'd recommend creating something more automated because you'd probably get a return on your investment. But for one 300 pg book it's not worth it in my opinion.
One file or muliple-files is a matter of preference in my opinion. In the old days, when processing power and memory were more expensive, creating a multi-file book was almost a necessity for long documents, but now you can easily get away with doing it in a single file. Furthermore, it would be easier for your project to create a single file initially, then if you really want, you can break it out into smaller files closer to the end relatively easily.
Regards,
Tom