How edit-friendly are the PDF files generated by Prince?

We're looking into using Prince to generate books, and our layout people would need to be able to import them into InDesign to do some tinkering.

There should be no problem with that, but given the variation in PDF-based workflows I would recommend you perform a quick test of loading some sample PDF files, either generated yourself or taken from our list of sample documents.

I'm curious what sort of tinkering you would want to do in InDesign, especially since CS4 at least can't open PDF files (don't have CS5 to try). We've been able to do amazing things in Prince...

Dave

I don't know of any software that can completely edit content in PDF files. Acrobat allows some manipulation, but not really editing, and Illustrator can open a page and allow some modification, but it's limited. PDF is pretty much a one way street in this sense.

The one semi-exception is that Illustrator can save an 'editable' PDF file, but what this is actually doing is to embed the actual original Illustrator.ai file in the PDF as a payload attachment, which Illustrator can later use for 'editing' the PDF.

It might be useful to have Prince attach the original HTML and CSS source code in the document, and although I can't think of a demonstrably useful real-world scenario for that right now, I'm sure someone can.

Note that this is all quite different from a Tagged PDF, which is something else, and seems to be on the radar: http://www.princexml.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=102

I agree. Prince can do amazing things including right-to-left. The things that are lacking are on the roadmap. The biggest two for me are still multiple footnote areas and inline footnotes.

These are for typesetting Bibles which have some very high requirements.

If the tinkering is adjusting picture placement/sizing or interactive tracking, check out
http://code.google.com/p/princess-2010/.

Jim Albright
Wycliffe Bible Translators