Making Pdfs Work For You

Making Portable Document Format Files Work for You Tuomas S. Kostiainen and Jill R. Sommer 2009 ATA Conference

Introduction
Translators encounter portable document format (PDF) files daily in various situations, but are often unable to utilize these files and the associated programs fully.
We will show you how to effectively work with PDF files

Introduction
C omparison of various versions of Acrobat
E diting and commenting in PDF files
C reating and filling electronic forms
U sing electronic signatures

Introduction
C onvert ing PDF files with optical character recognition tools to MS Word format for translation in translation environment tools
C reat ing translation memories from PDF files using LogiTerm AlignFactory

Portable Document Format
Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. It was released as an open standard in 2008.
PDF compresses documents into two-dimensional form, independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system.

Technology Involved
A PostScript page description programming language for generating the layout and graphics.
A font-embedding/replacement system to allow fonts to travel with the documents.
A structured storage system to bundle these elements and any associated content into a single file, with data compression where appropriate.

Adobe
Adobe Acrobat was one of the first software suites available to create and read PDFs.
Acrobat Reader (now Adobe Reader) is still the de facto standard for printable documents on the web (a standard web document).

Adobe
Anyone may create applications that can read and write PDF files without having to pay royalties to Adobe Systems; Adobe holds patents to PDF, but licenses them for royalty-free use in developing software complying with its PDF specification.

Tools
There are numerous tools available that allow you to create and edit PDF files.
Adobe Acrobat

Optical Character Recognition
PDFs can be either straight text or a graphic.
Optical character recognition (or OCR) allows you to scan the images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text to generate a machine-editable text.

OCR tools use pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and computer vision as well as digital character recognition.
The accurate recognition of Latin-script, typewritten text is now considered largely a solved problem on applications where clear imaging is available such as scanning of printed documents. Some tools can now easily recognize Cyrillic and Asian characters as well.

The most common OCR tool is ABBYY FineReader, but there are other tools available such as OmniPage, ABBYY PDF Transformer, AnyDoc, Microsoft Office Document Imaging, and SimpleOCR.
My personal favorite is ABBYY FineReader because it can handle lots of different languages with ease.

Abkhaz, Adyghian, Afrikaans, Agul, Albanian, Altai, Armenian (Eastern, Western, Grabar), Avar, Aymara, Azerbaijani (Cyrillic), Azerbaijani (Latin), Bashkir, Basic, Basque, Belarusian, Bemba, Blackfoot, Breton, Bugotu, Bulgarian, Buryat, C/C++, COBOL, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chechen, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Chukchee, Chuvash, Corsican, Crimean Tatar, Croatian, Crow, Czech, Dakota, Danish, Dargwa, Dungan, Dutch (Netherlands and Belgium), English, Eskimo (Cyrillic), Eskimo (Latin), Esperanto, Estonian, Even, Evenki, Faroese, Fijian, Finnish, Fortran, French,

Frisian, Friulian, Gagauz, Galician, Ganda, German (Luxemburg), German (new and old spelling), Greek, Guarani, Hani, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ido, Indonesian, Ingush, Interlingua, Irish, Italian, JAVA, Japanese, Jingpo, Kabardian, Kalmyk, Karachay-balkar, Karakalpak, Kasub, Kawa, Kazakh, Khakass, Khanty, Kikuyu, Kirghiz, Kongo, Koryak, Kpelle, Kumyk, Kurdish, Lak, Latin, Latvian, Lezgi, Lithuanian, Luba, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malinke, Maltese, Mansy, Maori, Mari, Maya, Miao, Minangkabau, Mohawk, Moldavian, Mongol, Mordvin, Nahuatl, Nenets, Nivkh, Nogay,

Norwegian (nynorsk and bokmål), Nyanja, Occidental, Ojibway, Ossetian, Papiamento, Pascal, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Provencal, Quechua, Rhaeto-romanic, Romanian, Romany, Rundi, Russian, Russian (old spelling), Rwanda, Sami (Lappish), Samoan, Scottish Gaelic, Selkup, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Shona, Simple chemical formulas, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Sunda, Swahili, Swazi, Swedish, Tabasaran, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tajik, Tatar, Thai, Tok Pisin, Tongan, Tswana, Tun, Turkish, Turkmen, Tuvinian, Udmurt, Uighur (Cyrillic), Uighur (Latin), Ukrainian,

Uzbek (Cyrillic), Uzbek (Latin), Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yakut, Zapotec, Zulu
I think you get the point.

OCR tools have problems with handwriting, static from fax transmissions, and tables, but there are ways to deal with that.

ABBYY Fine Reader

Making Pdfs Work For You

by bonnjill on Nov 06, 2009

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