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
- Choose a name and create your article
- Prepare for migration
- Migrate the text and format it
- Extract the images
- Upload and embed the images
- Do a final compare between the article and the original content
- Update the templates and categorization to show completion
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.
Choose a name and create your article
Prepare for migration
Transfer the text first
Transfering the text is pretty straightforward, but there are pitfalls. The basic approach is to copy, paste. Should be obvious, but there can be surprises. You can copy/paste directly into an Appropedia edit window, or into an intermediate document (such as Word) if you prefer.
Selecting
In Acrobat, to mark a section of text you must first "pick" (click on) the "select text" tool (this step is not always required in other applications). With the text-select tool chosen, select the text by clicking the mouse at the beginning of a text block (say, a paragraph) and dragging your mouse to the end of the text block. This should be obvious, but frequently PDF documents are produced with complex layouts (multiple columns, embedded text boxes and images, etc) that can result in strange text sequences, so it's best to keep alert for strange selection behavior, since you may not get what you expect.
Copy and paste
Once the text is selected, use "copy" function (there are many ways to invoke this function) to put the selected text on a "clipboard", then use the "paste" function to put the text into your destination. As soon as you have pasted, it's a good practice to check a few places in the destination to see that you actually transferred what you expected to. If not, you can usually use the "undo" feature to back up and try again.