trouble importing a PDF

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 From:  twofoot
4146.1 
I'm "special" today. LOL

Scanned from an old textbook into my Mac. Resized in Photoshop and kicked out as a PDF. Moi refuses to import it, though it does give me the option of choosing it before Moi ignores it.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Chris

EDITED: 20 Feb 2022 by TWOFOOT

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 From:  Michael Gibson
4146.2 In reply to 4146.1 
Hi Chris, it looks like your PDF only contains a bitmap image in it, not any vector info.

MoI only tries to read vector data from PDF files - bitmap data only contains a bunch of colored pixel dots and not any actual geometry like lines or curves.

For example if you load your PDF into the Adobe Acrobat viewer and zoom in on it closely, you'll be able to see that it is made up of little pixel squares. If it had vectors the edges would remain crisp instead of pixellated when you zoom in closely.


You'll need to run that scan through some kind of tracing mechanism to vectorize it, or instead of scanning it to PDF scan it to a bitmap image like JPEG or PNG and then you can bring it into MoI as a background image using the View > Image command and then manually trace it in MoI by drawing a curve over top of it using it as a reference.

Also if you have the option, instead of exporting to MoI as PDF try exporting as AI v8 format instead - PDF is a really complex format and MoI's importer is not very comprehensive and there are various kinds of PDF structures that can confuse it. But Adobe Illustrator v8 files have a much more simple structure than PDF files and MoI should be able to read in those AI files without running into problems. But they still need to contain vectors and not bitmap data in order for them to be opened with MoI.

- Michael
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 From:  twofoot
4146.3 In reply to 4146.2 
Thanks Michael. It's always the incredibly obvious simple stuff that gets me. LOL

C.
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