Reverse engineering a PDF

[karmiclychee]

So. I'd been working on a graphic novel for some time, doing the line drawings by hand and the painting in photoshop. I'd save each page individually as PSDs and then drop them into InDesign to do the layout.

To keep a much too long and irritating story short, after a series of very unfortunate events, all I have left of the project is the massive 300 DPI full size/full res mockup PDF I sent to the printer.

I would like to post the novel up on concept art, but the only digital stuff I have is this ungodly 100+ MB PDF. I feel like there should be a way to open it in InDesign like a book, or at least a way to compress it in a way that might make transmitting it doable.

Thoughts?

[vandalrat]

As long as you didn't protect it, you should be able to open it in acrobat or in-design.

If you did protect it and forgot the password, even adobe woulnd't open that file for you.

[karmiclychee]

It's not protected - I can open it in Acrobat, but InDesign doesn't seem to be able to handle just a plain PDF. And I can't seem to find an import option anywhere.

[Jem'ennuie]

A Hex editor and cut it up ^^.

[kev ferrara]

Combine PDFs is a program. Load the pdf into the program then delete all the pages you don't want then resave under a different name. Do this for each page.

http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/Freeware/CombinePDFs.shtml

I think its freeware. I'm using 1.0.

[DavePalumbo]

if you can open with acrobat, have you tried the "extract page" option under the document tab? I think this should do exactly what you want, but I could be misunderstanding the problem...

[karmiclychee]

I don't seem to have that option in my version of acrobat.

Basically, I have all 41 pages in a single gigantic PDF and I'd like to turn it back into either an InDesign file or even just a series of JPGs.

As it turns out, I can open the file in Photoshop and split the bastard up in there. It's just going to take... a long time.

[arttorney]

Sometimes it just goes that way. The thing Kev Ferrara suggested was going to be laborious too. The $40 software I saw down at the store (but didn't buy) probably wouldn't be any more convenient. It sounds like you got yourself in a bit of a pickle.

[kev ferrara]

The whole thing will take 10 minutes in Combine PDF. It'll take 10 hours to find a way to make that 10 minutes go quicker.