Content Management When Merging and Splitting

[PHK]

Can someone explain to me what is happening to base content when I Merge Pages, Split Pages, and then Merge Pages again?

What I see in the Content panel is some strange stuff. Suppose I have a two-page letter that is an OCRed PDF. I want to merge the two into one deleting the lower margin and footer of page one and both the upper and lower margins and footer and then merge the content pages into a single page.

If I view the Content panel on the freshly opened file, I see two entries: Page 1 and Page 2. Under them are the hierarchies of the content. All good.

If I Merge Pages, the Content panel is nearly unchanged except that there is only Page 1 with two entries, "XForm", under Page 1 and indented with the same sub-entries for content as above. In other words, in the Merge Pages operation all of the former Page 1 content was moved to a child entry of Page 1 under the first new XForm category and all the former Page 2 content is under a second new XForm category. So far, so good.

Now, I use Split Pages to isolate the wanted from the unwanted. I create three horizontal split lines and locate them in the obvious places to create a wanted page, followed by an unwanted page, followed by the wanted content page from the original page two, and that followed finally with an unwanted page. Now, the Content pane show four parent entries (Page 1, Page 2, etc.) with the all of the above XForm entries duplicated as subs of all four pages. So now I've got massive duplication of base content. Well, four whereas it need only be one. Bad. But if I delete the unwanted pages, we are down to two pages in Content but with the same two XForm sets. Better, but not ideal.

Finally, if I merge these two pages I get the document looking like it should but the duplication of base content in the Content panel from the previous step is still there under one parent, Page 1, but with two added XForms, each with the orginal content in two XForm child entries. I can see if the user did this multiple times (as I sometimes do) the duplicate XForm sets will just keep multiplying and creating huge bloat and confusion. Furthermore, all but one of these XForm child text entries point to the wrong destination on the page object. I'll let you guess which is good and which are bad.

So, could someone please explain to me what, if anything, I am doing wrong? Should I be doing a workaround and going into the Content panel and deleting redunance XForms after merging? That seems to be effective but I cannot be sure I would always remember to do it nor could I be sure not to delete the good and surely deleting all the bad ones.

I appreciate your consideration of my problem and look forward to your guidance.

[Paul - Tracker Supp]

Hi, PHK

I was thinking to attempt to reproduce your issue and ask the team why this is happening, but it occurred to ask first, if the duplication is "corrected" by doing a "Save As Optimised"?

[PHK]

Hi, PHK

I was thinking to attempt to reproduce your issue and ask the team why this is happening, but it occurred to ask first, if the duplication is "corrected" by doing a "Save As Optimised"?

Doesn't change a thing.

Hold off and I will post files that step-by-step it.

[PHK]

Here is an example, step by step each file.

1. Open file
2. Merge Pages
3. Split Pages
4. Delete unwanted pages.
5. Merge Pages
6. Delete XForms and specific redundant and misdirecting base content,

[PHK]

Oops, it's on me.

I do not usually have the split method preserving the original content on but somehow it was in this case. I don't know how I did that.

Sorry about wasteing everyone's time on this. I hope there is a precautionary note here to keep on eye on those options.

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello, PHK

No worries there PHK, it happens to us all. Thank you for letting us know!

Kind regards,