PDF based APP?

I am working on a project to make a literacy app based on a PDF published book, is there any idea how to make it with RAB?
I know that RAB only support several formats to start working.
Is there any extra feature that could do this coming soon?

Thanks

Gama Astivia
México

You can open a PDF file with Word (at least with Word 2016), which will attempt to convert the PDF file into a Word document. There will likely be a number of things that don’t come out quite right, especially formatting, but it usually gives a good first draft that you can edit and save as a .docx file, which is what RAB requires.

I normally do a lot of simplifying of formatting when I’m preparing a .docx file for RAB anyway. From my experience, you just want to have a limited set of styles (often just 2 or 3) for a file that you import into RAB.

We do NOT want a PDF import functionality in RAB. Android devices can already read PDF files, if you want people reading exactly that format. It’s better to think of RAB as providing another way to present the data of a document, but as with other cases of different presentation forms (print, web page, app), you should not expect the formatting to be identical - it needs to be adapted to the medium.

You need to think about a few questions.

  • Do you have the rights to make an app of the PDF?
  • Why do you want it in an app?
    • If it is just text and pictures. Would an ePub2 or ePub3 format suffice? Why not?
    • If you have audio too then it may be worth putting it in an app.
    • RAB does generally add improved navigation over an ePub.

RAB .docx handling

The Word .docx import in RAB is set up for picture books (one picture per page) where each page has a picture locked at the top and text below.

If you have a PDF most likely the document has pictures at various places in the text so is unlikely to suit a picture book style.

Going ahead with an app

  • You need to add pages/chapters to the document by putting in hard page breaks.

  • Do you what a picture book format?

    • If yes then you must have only one picture per page. If the picture is portrait format you may need to change it into a landscape format so you have room for text on the page.
    • If no, then you need to remove the picture/s in Word and replace with a paragraph with the following in the paragraph \fig picturename.jpg\fig*. Those picture files will need to be added into the Illustrations tab of the Images section.

Thank you for your responses, I am thinking con that.