Removing invisible text?

[fishshed]

We're working on a workflow to 'auto-size' pages and content for 3 different sizes of documents for print within PitStop Pro 11 - using PDFs created by our customers.  Most of these are created from Word and have all types of fun stuff (since our customers are not very skillful when it comes to formatting anything in Word) that we've figured out how to detect and remove before the content scaling. 

However, we can't figure out how to remove extra spaces that cause the 'art box' to expand well past the end of text.  In these cases, they have held down the space bar, inserted a bunch of tabs, or whatever to make the text flow - instead of using the built-in autoflow feature that was introduced in the 20s.   :wink:

In order to scale the content on the page properly, we would like to remove these before applying the design layout, so we're only scaling the visible text and art and setting the "art box" only to visible elements.  We've tried adding the "Remove invisible text/data" actions and they're not working as we want.

Any ideas?

[Joe]

I don't think the "Remove invisible text/data" will work because spaces, tabs, etc...are not invisible text. Have you tried the text search & replace in Pitstop 11?

[abc]

Have you looked at the global change 'crop to visible' .
I used this recently with a customer who had uneven left/right margins, we actually converted it to an action used it in conjunction with a design layout.
It cropped the pages to the content and then using the top left hand corner as a reference placed the content in a new design layout.

[DigiCorn]

What about using the "Select By Attributes," tool?

[abc]

You might also look at 'remove invisible objects without fill or stroke'

[DigitalCrapShoveler]

Microsoft Word, customer created and workflow don't belong in the same sentence. You're playing with fire trusting any automation.

[fishshed]

Uhhhh...   Yeah.  And seeing as we have about 6,000 customers sending us either their own PDFs (mostly created from Word files) or the Word file itself, this is the joy we deal with every day!

We're just wanting to automate as much as possible.  But it's detecting the "object" as having/not having a fill (see scrrenshot).  I've attached the PDF, as well.  Just trying to detect these on-the-fly, but I'm not sure it's gonna happen.

[DigitalCrapShoveler]

What if you used the Multipage Importer for InDesign to generate new PDFs from the provided files? I really don't see a way through Pitstop to do what you're asking.

[Joe]

Uhhhh...   Yeah.  And seeing as we have about 6,000 customers sending us either their own PDFs (mostly created from Word files) or the Word file itself, this is the joy we deal with every day!

We're just wanting to automate as much as possible.  But it's detecting the "object" as having/not having a fill (see scrrenshot).  I've attached the PDF, as well.  Just trying to detect these on-the-fly, but I'm not sure it's gonna happen.

Testing on the PDF you attached...if you convert all text to outlines it seems to get rid of the extra text lines.

[DigitalCrapShoveler]

6,000 customers and how ever many files attached to each? And converting them all to outlines? I gotta see this shit. :laugh: It does fix the problem, though.

[Joe]

6,000 customers and how ever many files attached to each? And converting them all to outlines? I gotta see this shit. :laugh: It does fix the problem, though.

Ehhh..make an action. Run the action on every file. Or if they have Pitstop server you can automate it just by running all of the PDFs through the server before doing anything else. Of course doing text edits after this will be virtually impossible.

[DigitalCrapShoveler]

That roughly makes every page 33% larger in file size. That number would increase depending on the amount of text on each page. We're not talking a whole lot of memory here, but processing time ripping all those points could be a problem. And as Joe mentioned, you would not be able to make any text edits.

[Joe]

Definitely has some down side to it. Like everything else in printing.

[DigitalCrapShoveler]

Ain't that the truth.

[abc]

HI guys

Spoke to development about this, technically it's still a font and it has a size and a color so at the moment there's no action to select it.

however technically we can write something that would detect a text line full of these type of characters and then allow you to do something with it like delete.

So it's on the list for  a future version, challenge will be to describe it in a sensible way