Thank you, Perkins!

Blackberry lawsuit settled: [link]

$612M. Wow.

I think the company suing was hoping for a lot more. Somewhere I read that this lower amount is a reflection on the patent issue going badly for the suing company....

Spidra, insent.

For anyone who cares - I finally got my TiVO working again. All I needed was the stupid IR cable. I wish I knew what I did with the one that came with the set. Gah.

Dana

I know there's freeware out there that will let you create a PDF from a Word doc. Is there anything that goes in reverse? Approximately three thousand of the source documents for my new project are PDFs, and my life would be a lot easier if they were editable.

Not freeware, but for under $200 bucks there is scanscoft, which has saved my life in terms of extracting large amounts of tabular data from pdfs. Will either translate the whole thing into word document with word tables, or just extract the tables as excel worksheets. One thing, while it does a pretty good job of preserving fonts and margins and such, you will lose minor amounts of formatting.

Bonus: much better at translating your word docs back into pdfs. Better options for creating lower resolution, smaller files for example or high quality publishing ready. Also some funky stuff with margins some of the free stuff does it does not.

I think Adobe Acrobat might be under $200 itself, isn't it?

Yup, I'm estimating high cause I don't remember the price. I actually think I paid $99, but don't remember the exact price. But Scanscoft will import pdfs and turn them into word - which is ten time better than acrobat for getting data out of them. If Dana is just editing, making minor content changes and such then acrobat is better, or even just replacing whole paragraphs. But with 5,000 source documents it sounds possible that Dana is actually consolidating data from multiple sources, or making other major chages. Believe me, being able to get stuff into excel and word, make your changes and then shoot it back into PDF is well worth the extra bucks - at least if the time-is-money-theory still counts for anything - unless the edits are really fairly minor.

t On Edit

But you were right to call me on it. I saw "5,000 source documents" and immediately assumed the kind of stuff that requires scansoft. But I should have asked - because it could well be simple changes where Acrobat is the best choice. Too long since I did user support.

The issue is that I am a contractor and therefore not able to spend anyone's money (except my own, and...no). Thanks for the info, though. I'll keep it for reference.