Recently, after a corporate identity upgrade, my client realised the company had tons of technical PDFs with the previous logo. But as I wrote, the company had only the documents in pdf format and nothing else, no DOC, no INDD. What to do? Here you the tutorial with the procedure I have been using.
First thing first: do not panic and open Adobe InDesign.
1_Crop the PDF with Acrobat Professional, remove all the layout components you are willing to delete. Choose Document > Crop pages (or press Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + T).
In the pop-up menu in the upper left corner, leave CropBox selected, and then adjust values for the Margin Controls, you'll see a black bar showing the selecion you are cutting. In the lower right area, Page Range, select All.
2_ Open Indesign and create the new layout. Keep it simple, because you will not be able to edit the text body of your PDF (shape, columns, fonts and colours...)
3_ Choose File > Insert (or press Ctrl/Cmd + D) and select your prevoiusly cropped PDF. In the pop up manu make sure to select "Show Import Options". Click Open.
4_ The "Show Preview" dialog box displays a page in the PDF before you place it. If you’re placing a page from a PDF that contains multiple pages, click the arrows, or type a page number under the preview image to preview a specific page. Specify the pages you want to place: the page displayed in the preview, all pages, or a range of pages. Choose Transparent background. Click OK.
5_ Now you can notice a very small, low-res preview of your PDF next to the mouse arrow. Click once on each page of the new document. The PDF pages will place where you click with your mouse.
6_ Now you are able to move the old PDF pages to fit the new layout. It takes a while, expecially on long documents, but it is still way faster than retyping everything.
7_ It's time to export the document to generate a new PDF.
Choose File > Export. In the pop up menu choose "Save as Adobe PDF". Click Save and choose your exporting options. I usually choose PDF/X-1a:2001. Export.
8_ Your new PDF file is ready. Thanks to InDesign the new PDF has selectable text and all the other previous features.
It happend to me as well, with a 300 pages document. I had to say no to my client, what a shame. Your tutorial is very useful even if this methodology is not flexible with fonts and so on.
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