Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) was designed to provide an application and OS independent format that could be viewed freely (in both the "no cost" and "no constraint" senses) by anyone. The encoding of PDF documents does not always lend itself to easy migration to the "wiki text" format (or even to other formats). The steps below are offered as a relatively straightforward, low stress process to approach the porting process.
The steps below assume that you have downloaded a recent version of Adobe Acrobat, which includes some features that the earlier versions did not include.
Please also review Help:How to port pages to be sure that you handle copyright permissions and Appropedia conventions correctly.
Steps in porting PDF to Wikitext
- Choose a reasonable source document===
- The following phases are suggested.
- Migrate the text
Choosing a reasonable source document
Before you begin the porting process, be sure that your wikitext skills are compatible with the document content that you wish to port. If you have a collection of documents that are available for porting (as often happens), begin by porting some simpler documents. Content features that require a bit of experience are listed below, along with a link to the WikiMedia help for the content:
- Tables. See Wikimedia:Help:table
- Images. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Extended image syntax
- Web links. See Wikimedia:Help:Link
- Footnotes. See Wikimedia:Help:Footnotes
Once you're comfortable with the wiki formatting side of things, the tricky bit is often in extracting the content from the PDF document. The best approach is to be patient, break it down in to phases, and move through it step by step. You can port a fairly simple 5 page PDF document in 15 minutes, but complexity will add time; 5 pages could be an hour or more if there are lots of tables, footnotes, images and links.