After running some experiments, it seems *.pdf files which are attached as media files do not get printed in scrapbook reports. I am not seeing another report type that prints them. I am not finding a way to create a book that includes them either. Am I missing something?
PDF files are not media files even if they contain media in them. They should be added with the Media type: Files, not Images. You could trick it and select Image and let it build a thumbnail of the first page of the PDF. It will use that thumbnail on reports that show the primary image. But, the scrapbook will not support it as an image.
I’ve had this problem for years when adding items to the ‘gallery’ tab in Ancestry. It’s particularly annoying when copies of birth and death certificates, as well as wills, come from the UK Government site as PDF’s unless you want to pay a premium for an actual certificate. To be fair, you can now get 19th century births and deaths in jpg for £3 each from the GRO. I ‘solved’ this by printing out the pdfs and then scanning them as jpgs. Not rocket science but quite quick (after you have cleared the backlog!) and simple.
*.pdf is probably the single most widely used format for digital copies of documents of all kinds. Just a couple of specific examples of documents of interest for genealogy work are birth certificates and remembrances. It is of no use to be able to store a pdf file in RM if it is not possible to generate a report or book containing the pdf content.
For single page documents, a workaround for RM would be to convert the pdf to an image format (jpg etc.). Given that the rest of the world is using pdf, this is an undesired limitation, since converting pdf to image will require another piece of software that one would not otherwise typically have.
For multiple page documents, I don’t see any possible workaround. For text content, you could use OCR software to convert to text, or retype the content, and then store it as a text note in RM. These are very time consuming chores for a larger document. If the document is a mix of graphic and text content, there is no work-around that I see.
I’ve been working hard with RM for a few weeks now, and this issue is the first one that is a potential deal breaker. RM should, at a minimum, be able to support pdf content in RM reports and books. If some restrictions are necessary (EX: the pdf was generated to support printout on letter sized paper) then ok.
In Windows you can open the PDF in Microsoft Edge (or one of many other Browsers), then use the Windows “Snipping Tool” to select and save an image in a true graphics format. No other software required unless you want to edit the image. On a Mac there are at least two built-in options “Screenshot” or the Preview app which has more included image editing/image conversion features.
Yes, I see that the screenshot feature in windows is an easy workaround for single-page pdf documents… That leaves the problem of multiple page documents.
On mac you just open pdfs in Preview (part of OS) and Save As JPG choosing quality level.
It is so silly for RM to make the user tell it a PDF is a file to add to the media gallery. FTM adds PDFs, JPGs, etc without fuss.
It amuses me when people use terms like ‘deal breaker’ as that implies that there are other software options that will do what you want and you will move to them if you don’t get your way. To the best of my knowledge, none of the major genealogy packages does what you think you want.
Secondly, RM needs to generate reports that can be exported to various text formats. That means that RM would need to extract the text to include in the reports, which means you would likely need to edit that text anyway. And what about all of those PDF files that are not just text, they have images, backgrounds and so forth. How about those certificates that have seals and other non-text bits. Maybe if you are a hotshot programmer, you can write a package that will do all of these things. To the best of my knowledge, no word processing software allows you to stick a PDF file right in the middle of their documents, so why would you expect RM to magically do this? Sure, you can open PDFs in Word, but it still involves Word extracting the text. If you are using PDFs that contain handwritten text, then it would need to be OCR’ed which again is not always accurate and would involved editing.
Why? if you can take on screenshot or clip one page, then you can do the others.
Publisher is the means offered to add mixed content of reports/charts/lists etc. and the Blank pages option reserves location for additional insertions (such as .PDFs)
Ok, I see. A work around for a mixed media multi page pdf document is to add blank pages in a RM book. You could then replace the hardcopy blank pages with a hardcopy of the multi-page pdf document. If you want to have a soft copy of the complete book you are trying to create, you could use pdf split and merge software to create it. That is a solution, albeit one that requires labor and tools outside of RM.
… you don’t use multi-page PDF’s 
They’re both a cross-platform convenience and an obstacle in some other usages, thus the (oft-asked on the internet) “How do I…” regarding add/edit/extract/etc. -and- why RM forgoes those programming exercises.
PDF’s are a Container format - Wikipedia
Screen captures of PDF content (and/or the other mixed-formatting filetypes like Word documents Excel spreadsheets and the like) in single page form is the alternative to extracting graphics/text.
If one has only a hard copy source for a large mixed media document that is many pages long, then scanning it and taking many many screen shots of it is not an acceptable solution to me, nor is it going to be an acceptable solution to most people.
pdf files are by far the most widely used method in the world today to share a soft copy of a many-page document.
We’re talking RootsMagic here.
If your aim is a soft copy… your question has been answered.
On mac it is no problem to add a pdf or jpg file to an existing Pages word document where both are treated as image files. Another option is to select text in the PDF file and paste that selection into Pages as ocr’d text. Perhaps I misunderstand your comment.