I'm looking for new ideas and tips on importing and exporting PDFs with DOORS - I know about Word conversions and RPE but was wondering if the brain trust out there can provide the latest guidance they have found successful. |
Re: DOORS and PDFs Not easy - have used Adobe Acrobat to export into MSWord\RTF format, this often results in a mess of styles and the MSWord\RTF doc usually needs a lot of work to get it into a format that will readily import into DOORS. Have also tried to export from Acrobat into TXT and XML format then import those into MSWord to see if there's any improvement, very rarely is that the case. Exporting PDF's Firstly, PDF export is not native to DOORS, you have to export to an installed PDF printer. If I'm working with pragmatic customer that doesn't have too many hang ups about a specification looking like a holiday brochure or a work of art, I do the following but you need a PDF app like Adobe Acrobat to help. Split a document to be produced from DOORS into two parts, the front bit and the back bit! The back bit consists of the table of contents and the body of the spec. The DOORS built in "Page Set-up" and "Print" functions are used to produce the back bit in PDF (the "Page Set-up" - "Table" layout option is used) - there's nothing wrong with this print job, it's quite readible, it handles DOORS tables if your using them, and what's more, it's lightening quick to produce compared to DocExpress, WEXP and RPE (although RPE is quite good). You can take advantage of PDF features to include corporate logo's or additional header\footer boiler text if needed. You can also use a larger page size like A3 to fit more in and then use PDF to zoom this down to a smaller default print page size like A4 (it's still quite readable). The front bit is done using MSWord, this has the front cover page with all of the usual corporate logo stuff, sign-off boxes, change history etc etc. This is converted to PDF and combined with the back bit to create a single PDF document. The MSWord front bit is re-used for each successive release so it doesn't have to be fully regenerated every time. The turn around time for this is much quicker than exporting to MSWord and then doing all of the post export sanity checks and fine tune format fixes. Paul Miller Melbourne, Australia |