Hi,
One of my clients wants to redo her website. She sent me four PDF files showing the home page, a list of products, product details, and a contact form. She wants the website to match the PDFs exactly. Her designer isn’t able to provide the HTML/CSS versions, so I’ll need to recreate everything from those PDFs.
Knowing how picky she is, I’m a bit worried. I’ve searched and read about tools such as pdf2htmlEX. Has anyone here used it?
If she’s that picky, I would also check the pdf’s when you size them up and down. Most pdf’s do not react at all like a browser would, often remaining at the same size (ie, as if they were a fixed size image) as you scale them. She may not have considered a responsive site at all. Better to get that worked out before you start.
This project began in September 2024, and she went through at least half a dozen versions of the new logo with several designers. She approved a design I created for her new website, and 15 minutes (!) before going live, she rang me to postpone it. A month later, she wrote me saying that she felt that the new website “doesn’t show how I am.” So yes, she is a bit complicated.
And indeed, the responsive site is gloriously missing from the PDFs.
A web page can never match a PDF exactly unless it’s a fixed width page. If that’s what she wants I would turn heel and 
It doesn’t seem to me that you are anywhere near close to starting a design with this client. She has used a designer who doesn’t understand the web to create her designs. Its like getting your car serviced in a shop that sells pictures of cars. 
At the very least you need to request responsive example of these designs so that she and you know how they are to respond at different screen widths. I wouldn’t code anything (apart from wireframes) until you have educated her about the web as that is part of your job as a web developer. I don’t hire a mechanic and then proceed to tell him how to change an engine.
I’ve lost count of the times that customers would expect a website to behave just like an image of that website would behave and basically scale up and down to fit exactly.
I always told my customers that their PSD/PDF or whatever is just a starting point unless it has been designed by a bona fida web designer that understands the medium they are working in.
Any tool like that is only going to output loads of absolutely positioned divs and be virtually no use at all. The person that designed the pdf should be able to supply you the relevant images in a web friendly format so that you can build the site properly.
In the end I would make sure that you have the conversation with your client and come to an agreement before you begin so that you both know what’s involved. Some clients may not be web savvy at all and not realise what has to be accomplished.
I have known her for about 13 years now, and each new version of her website was an odyssey. But this was the first time she decided to ask somebody else for the design.
Good analogy, as she is in the real estate business, I am going for this one: “Working with a PDF to build a website is like being given a photo of a building and being asked to reconstruct it without the architectural blueprints.”
I thought that any tool would produce a not very friendly CSS output. By asking, I just wanted to make sure I didn’t miss something.
It sounds so basic to me that I was surprised that the designer didn’t want to provide the HTML/CSS. But I don’t know what the agreement was. She is not at all web savvy, so I suppose she wasn’t aware of the responsive side of a website.
18 days later I am still waiting for my client’s answer !
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