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×÷ÕߣºHector Calabia 

Conversion problems

The conversion is not without problems, though. PDFs are very capricious creatures, indeed. They may come in all sorts of formats, from the usual letter-size page layout to complex (and big!) newspaper-like pages. I have often received “unfolded brochures” that contained four or more successive pages, one beside the other, forming one big PDF page, maybe 25 in. long. Often, Word cannot handle these unusual printing formats. Tables, columns and boxes all present problems. The conversion programs can do an admirable job of rendering these printed formats as visually attractive Word documents, but under the surface the converted files are nightmarish: they are full of strange styles, disparate measures, unconventional character and line spacing... just for the sake of mimicking as closely as possible the original document.

Often, if you try to process these documents with Trados or any other computer aided translation packet, the scene is ripe for disaster. It’s too much like a house of cards: nice to watch, but you cannot touch it. The unavoidable modifications that a translation entails will quite probably play havoc with these documents.

There is no hope, then? Not entirely: in difficult cases, I resort to manual extraction. Also, some extraction programs offer a menu of layout options for the converted file: you can select from the full recreation of the original appearance, to plain text extraction. I often find a middle-of-the-road selection satisfactory: I keep some typographical features (such as headers, bold type and italics), and suppress everything else

Regenerating the original PDF document

In most cases, a translator simply cannot (and should not) attempt this. I have seen some well-meaning attempts to deliver a “PDF-like” document, and they were failures. The client (or the agency) has to provide for proper DTP if necessary. And, believe me, the DTP-person will not thank you for any complex formatting in your document. More often than not, the very first thing that a DTP specialist has to do is to eliminate all complex formatting from the translated file, in order to be able to lay out it again.

However, in some special cases, you may provide a PDF document in order to protect your work, or as a sample (see below).

Using PDF to your advantage

Independently of the format of received document, you can use the Acrobat format to your advantage. Few translators own the full Acrobat “maker” program because it is relatively expensive (US$299 the “Standard version” from Adobe) and apparently there isn’t much use for it. Nowadays, there are many third-party PDF generators, which although they may not offer all the features of the Adobe product, are perfectly suitable for most jobs. Once again, you can find many of them by doing an Internet search on “PDF generator”. My personal favorite is PDF 995 at http://www.software995.com/, a very good program created by former Adobe employees.

And what do you want to generate PDFs for? Mainly for invoicing. Invoices in PDF are difficult to tamper with, can be printed as originals and many businesses accept them as equivalent to their printed counterparts. You can password protect them, so that they cannot be modified, and you can even sign them electronically. As with all electronic documents, they are easy to file and retrieve. You can also send budgets and bids in PDF format: Word documents or e-mail messages cannot give the kind of long-term security that a PDF offers.

For the same reason, in some cases you can also send PDF files as backup for Office documents or as an easily viewed complement to original DTP files (such as Quark Xpress or InDesign). Many users do not have the means to see these files, but they can easily check the PDF printed from them.