Exporting Clip Notes to Another program

[Don Sligar]

I am beginning to answer my own question, but thought I might pass along the info. In short, maybe you can and probably you can’t get a printed report from ClipNotes. I have been researching this on Adobe Forums and discovered others have had the same thoughts, but no answers from Adobe. In the Clip Notes pdf you can list all of the comments in a table format, add or delete them or even mark them as accomplished…cool! But, in Adobe Pro, Adobe has grayed out the printer icon, required some kind of password, and require tagging which is secured by password to output to Word. Does anyone know what the password is or why can’t Adobe give it out?

I have tried exporting to text and bringing into a spread sheet. At that point I get the headers of the table and the first row, but not everything although all rows are highlighted.

I have found Ovisfdf a shareware program to read the data xfdf file and convert it to a csv file, but the demo will only do a few lines. I don’t know if that is the demo limitation or the same issue as above in exporting from Adobe PDF Reader Pro. The program is about $100 so I am kind of cautious about purchasing without knowing.

If anyone would have any ideas on the subject I would appreciate knowing. Obviously, from the unanswered posts on the Adobe Forum they probably don’t know either.

[Alex Udell]

Print? From a PDF file? egads…you must be mad…what an odd request…

LOL…

that’s quite Ironic…

Sorry I can’t contribute meaningfully to this…but it made me chuckle.

🙂

Alex

[Don Sligar]

It is weird. You can print the page of the ClipNote for the PDF file, but all you get is the screen stage and current viewable note. My client would like to see a “hard” print copy of all the suggested changes of which you can see on the screen by expanding the comments. You just can not print it. It is funny that Adobe would not think of this. Also, sometimes it is nice to have a “paper list” in front of you if you are deleting the original marker from the timeline.

It seems easy, but not what the developers were thinking. It makes editing changes so easy that no one probably thought a person might want to keep a historical record.

[John Baumchen]

I haven’t tried it yet but since the data is in XML format, and you have the header information, you might try creating a PDF form, (if you have Acrobat 8 or 9 professional version), with fields that mirror the header information from your clipnotes file.

This way, you might be able to import the xml data from clipnotes.

I’ll try it over the next few days and let you know how it works out.

[Don Sligar]

I would appreciate your try. I messed around with Acrobat Pro and could not figure it out. My apology, but I am not an Acrobat expert and have never been able to clearly figure out all the program can or will do. I tried bringing in the file as a PDF form without success. It just appears strange to me why Adobe would turn off the print function from the Acrobat version of the PDF.

Thanks.

[Alex Udell]

It seems kind of silly….

but what about one of those PDF print add ons like Primo PDF?

Open the PDF then File Print and choose Primo PDF as the printer….

long shot, but it might work…

Alex

[John Baumchen]

Sorry to say that I was unsuccessful in my efforts to work around Adobe’s locks. I suppose someone who is a database guru might know of a solution.

Cheers.

[Cecil Esquivel]

This is what I did, on a Mac, in the Terminal

(where there is a file or folder in the command, you type it, or you can drag it in from the Finder into the Terminal window, and it will expand to the Unix path for it.)


cd /path/to/xfdf-file/
grep "\[" movie-clipnotes.xfdf | sed s/">"// | sed s/"<.*"// | sed s/" "/" "/ > movie-clipnotes.txt


[Cecil Esquivel]

That should have been
grep "\[" movie-clipnotes.xfdf | sed s/">"// | sed s/"<.*"// | sed s/"&#xD;"/" "/ > movie-clipnotes.txt

(all on one line)

The <code> tags on Ccow don’t deal with the “&” properly, and take it as literal HTML. The above should work.