I am trying to write a macro that creates a pdf of a Word document.
The code I have been using to do this uses ActiveDocument.ExportAsFixedFormat. This works up to a point, but it tends to fail when creating a pdf of a large document (and some of the documents I'll be processing with this macro run to thousands of pages).
My understanding is that the ExportAsFixedFormat method uses Word's built-in PDF creation methods. What I really want to do is use Adobe Acrobat to do the PDF conversion. If I do that manually by clicking on the export as pdf buttons within Word (I have Adobe Acrobat installed on my machine) then everything is fine. It uses the actual Adobe Acrobat PDF conversion, and my PDF gets created without errors even on documents large enough to cause the ExportAsFixedFormat method to fail.
I've been trying to figure out how to automate the conversion to PDF from VBA using Acrobat, and banging my head against a brick wall.
I discovered the CreatePDFEx method, which in theory looks like it should do what I want, but I also discovered warnings that this is not a supported method and is not recommended. See here:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/286431
And indeed when I tried it, it didn't work.
I then discovered the AcroExch.AVDoc and AcroExch.PDDoc objects, which looked like it might be another way. See, for example, here:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/301714
That also came with a warning that it wasn't supported. When I tried it, it worked, but it was painfully slow, even with documents of just a few pages. I hate to think what it would be like with a 5000 page document.
Is it actually possible to do this? It doesn't seem like it should be rocket science, but I am failing to find anything that works.
All I want to be able to do is to reliably create pdfs from large Word docs. I think that probably the way to do that is to figure out how to use Adobe's tools via VBA (is there a supported method?), but I'd be perfectly happy with the built in Word method if I could solve the problem of it failing with large documents.
Many thanks for any help.
Edit: I should also have mentioned that I need my Word headings to end up as PDF bookmarks. The ExportAsFixedFormat method does that, but some other methods don't.
You can use the SaveAs or SaveAs2 method to save as a PDF instead of ExportAsFixedFormat. For example:
ActiveDocument.SaveAs FileName:="Filename.pdf", FileFormat:=wdFormatPDF
On a bit more playing around, I did come up with one method which is an official supported method and uses the Adobe PDF creator:
ActivePrinter = "Adobe PDF"
ActiveDocument.PrintOut
The problem with that is that it doesn't turn my Word headings into PDF bookmarks.
Does anyone know if it's possible to set some options in that code so that it does?
Related
I would like to ask the following if possible. We have a client that wants a separate pdf document, embedded in a main pdf document and opens when you click it. Like the function in MS Word where you can attach another Word document inside a Word document (Word-ception, lol) and you can still open it.
I've tried it in Acrobat Pro with the Attachment and Link tools. Another option was to put the link document in an ftp server for accessibility. but our client really wants this functionality. Is this possible in Indesign?
Thank you!
Using Word as your example vehicle there are several ways to link 2 documents.
One is an appendix to the other, in PDF terms is a merge or binding but its one flowing document with separate sequential sections/chapters.
Another way is to link to an external file, in PDF terms a hyperlink to a relative second file, which can be locally folder relative or a web absolute reference. You have tried that.
In Word we can add objects internally with icons, in PDF that can be an annotation comment attachment to save externally and action accordingly. You also seem to discount that approach.
Finally PDF offers an Adobe Specific Structure where multiple PDFs attachments can be imbedded in an overall PDF wrapper. These are called Portfolios and not! to be confused with their portfolio service
They are unpopular since in a browser without Adobe Reader they should only offer the cover page.
Whilst in securer offline readers the files may well be shown as attachments that you need to save or independently open to view them.
Only some non Acrobat viewers may view them as a collection. And in the past that required runing insecure SWFlash, But I understand that has changed ?
Here is how the 3 internal PDF files seen above were shown in older Acrobat 9.
Possibly the best experience is using Foxit Reader
I am creating a separate question, stemming from this one. The used code is almost the same. The reason is that the original problem was about subsetting a font with pdfbox, which I kind of dealt with. I got faced though with another problem, which is : the annotations, and how the fonts used in them are interpreted by particularly Acrobat Reader DC.
I tried different combinations of fonts and embedding options and got rather desperate. The fact is that I had a feeling that in particular the way these things are handled by the programs that interpret the PDF files is non-standard. I think I read somewhere that the annotations and the way they are displayed is on purpose non-standardized by the PDF format, to give freedom to the interpreters to handle them in their own way, since the main purpose of the annotations is the interaction with the user. TL;DR I cannot understand why Acrobat Reader DC doesn't like the annotations I have created and saved with PDFBOX. I even opened a question on friendly and helpful Adobe's User Community forum. But as I expected, someone suggested me to better investigate this question with the PDFBOX team.
Everything is possible, but rather than writing a question on PDFBOX mailing list (I could never get used or understand the efficient use of the mailing lists btw), I want to open a question here because I hope that it could help others to understand the PDF format better.
I basically rephrase the above question from the Adobe's forums here: Here is an example (Google Drive link) with FreeText annotations (but it seems to make no difference if I use Stamp annotations instead), it causes problems when open by Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (file) version 21.001.20149.37945 (I think this corresponds to April 16th '21 update). Specifically the problem happens when the Comments pane is opened by the user, either manually or automatically.
Manually:
link
Automatically:
link
While experimenting, I also tried to unset the "Use local fonts" option in Preferences -> Page Display. I had the impression that maybe Acrobat Reader will be more eager to show the error message once it is not allowed to substitute the erroneously embedded fonts with the possible local fonts. I am not sure if this is true.
The error that I get is the infamous "Cannot extract the embedded font XXXXXX+SomeFontName" as seen in the below picture:
link
The same problems happen also if I use full font embed (subsetting option set to false when using PDType0Font.load). I also tried to embed OpenSans font instead of LiberationSans, also tried to manually convert LiberationSans to a TTF font with fewer glyphs using FontForge, even tried to use Windows ARIALN.TTF, thinking that maybe the font is the problem. All cause the same behavior in Acrobat Reader DC. I have also tried to run Acrobat Reader 2019 Pro Preflight on the document and in the profile that scans the document for the possible font inconsistencies, it reports no errors.
Of course, when I use e.g. PDType1Font.HELVETICA instead of custom TTF font, I do not get the above errors. But I cannot use it because it does not contain the glyphs for the Unicode characters that I use. Does anybody have a better idea?
Thank you very much!
EDIT: to make myself clear - the error does not appear ALWAYS. it appears on some machines constantly (e.g. I am using Windows 7 64-bit with latest Acrobat Reader DC installed to reproduce it fairly well), while on my Windows 10 64-bit with the same version of Acrobat Reader DC it sometimes appears, and sometimes not - I haven't figured out why or in what cases.. - which makes me think - but no - I checked that too - the font I am using opens up alright on the machine where the problem is fairly constant)
UPDATE: at my wits ends again, I created a blank page with Apache OpenOffice, exported it to PDF, opened it with Acrobat Reader DC (last version), added a FreeTextTypewriter annotation (View -> Tools -> Comment -> Open) with 4 greek letters in ArialNarrow font, saved it, reopened it with Acrobat Reader DC, and it gives me the same error (cannot extract the embedded font...).. So this could be the Reader problem? But they made this so difficult to diagnose.. Here is the file, but I do not expect it to show errors on other machines. It's one of those moments that you start to believe in magic and the power of prayer (and a good sleep)
UPDATE 30/04/2021
So, to sum things up, I haven't come with a solution yet, but I came up with three files created with PDFBOX, OpenPDF (iText5 fork) and Acrobat Reader DC itself (can append annotations and save - just adding a simple Text box with greek text through Comment pane) - and they all issue the above error message, when open by Acrobat Reader DC. I have posted details in the Acrboat Reader forum here (same link as in comment)
I have added the code that I used to create the OpenPDF example file here and the example 3 files are in the same repository here
This is not a back-end programming question. I can only modify the markup or script (or the document itself). The reason I'm asking here is because all my searches for appropriate terms inevitably lead to questions and solutions about programming this functionality. I'm not trying to force it via progrmaming; I have to find out why this PDF is behaving differently.
So:
I have a bunch of links to PDFs on a page. Most of them open in new tabs, but one of them, the most recent, starts to open in a tab, but then the tab closes and the PDF gets downloaded as a file instead. All markup is consistent - there's nothing differnt about the odd-man-out except the actual URL.
You can see this here:
http://calwater.mwnewsroom.com/Investor-Relations/Financial-Reports/Annual-Reports
All annual reports up to 2012 open in a new tab, but 2013 downloads instead.
This leads me to believe that there is some meta-data property of the PDF itself that tells it how to open, and that, in this case, the 2013 PDF was created using different settings.
Apparently, the PDF was saved out to PDF from InDesign.
Does anyone have any insight?
Problem solved. There was simply an error in the string (like an extra period) that references the attachment such that it couldn't tell it was a PDF. Fixing the reference fixed the problem.
I'm converting WORD docs to PDF programmatically using vb.net and ghostscript. This word doc I’m having problems with has hyperlinks to external URLs and also hyperlinks to bookmarks within the document. When the doc is converted to PDF the external URLs work but the links to the bookmarks do not.
I have searched for a solution to get these bookmarks to work on the output PDF but haven’t had any luck. Hopefully someone has done this and can share the solution.
Ghostscript only handles PDF or PostScript as an input, there are sibling products to handle XPS and PCL as well but none of them handle Word .doc files. So you must be converting the Word file into something else.
I'll hazard a guess that you are using the Windows PostScript printer driver to convert to PostScript and passing that to GS (possibly via the RedMon Port Monitor) to convert into PDF.
Now PostScript doesn't support hyperlinks, bookmarks, or any of the other paraphernalia of a viewing application, since its intended as a print language. To overcome this Adobe introduced an extension, the pdfmark operator, which can be used to create this kind of information. NOTE this is an extension which is only supported for conversion to PDF.
So, in order to get these inserted, you need to create pdfmarks in the PostScript. If you are printing from Word, this means that you have to insert PostScript into the file when printing. There is a 'pass through' mechanism for this purpose.
So what you need to do is create the appropriate Visual Basic script in Word which inserts the relevant pdfmarks when the document is printed. This is how the Adobe plug-in for Word (which used to be called PDFMaker a long time ago) works.
Have a look at this tool.
It does maintain bookmarks and hyperlinks.
http://www.transcom.de/transcom/en/2004_pdf-t-maker.htm
I have built an application that automates the filling out of form fields inside a pdf. It then takes various assets and combines them together to generate a "print ready" product. All of this is accomplished using the magic of iTextSharp. When form fields are populated, they are then flattened to text. The problem is that even with the fonts embedded they aren't really attached to the form fields in a meaningful way (like straight text elements are) and the printers are complaining that the pdf is generating licensing errors due to this. I researched this a bit and it just seems to be the nature of how form fields are.
The artists we are working with requested that we research a way to "outline" the text that is created from flattening the form fields. I found that running the PDF Optimizer with a custom preset allows for Text Outlining in Acrobat, and even better I can generate an Acrobat Sequence that runs this command on the pdf. The problem is that Sequences can not be automated, at all.
I found a plug-in called AutoBatch that allows for the execution of Sequences on the command line through a batch file. The downside is that this would require installing Acrobat Pro and the Plug-in on the server this application will be running on. Further it seems like an overkill solution just to outline the text in the pdf. For all I know at this point iTextSharp may allow me to do this programmatic, but searching for such a thing on google returns little results and nothing relevant.
So the question: Is there a better way to outline text in a pdf than the current solution I have implemented or am I kind of stuck?
TLDR; PDF is generated w/ non-standard fonts. I need to "outline" this text to send it to the printer. Currently using AutoBatch Acrobat Plug-In to execute Acrobat Sequence from the Command Line. Seems excessive, wondering if anyone knows a better way to automate font outlining.
I am also in a printing environment and have used forms for "Box Covers" plenty of times to shorten the code used to produce box covers.
I simple us "pdfStamper.FormFlattening = true;" and the printers (Xerox DP180 and DC5000) has no problems in using the PDF.
The moment I leave out FormFlattening the printer gives a lot of errors regarding the PDF.
If you are using FormFlattening then check if the printer has the font locally installed in order for it to reference the font from the print engine instead of the PDF resources.