Mar 5

Written by:
Friday, 5 March 2010 

A client asked me yesterday if I could convert a PDF back into an editable format, mainly Microsoft Word.

“No problem” I said, “I’ll take a look”

The PDF was an old marketing flyer for their business. They wanted to make some changes but had misplaced the original document.

So I launched Adobe Acrobat Professional, version 8 and had a look at the document.

First thing I checked for was “is the document a scanned image or not?”.

It wasn’t; text was selectable. Phew. Good start. This means the program would have an easier time converting the text.

So tried to use the Export functionality.

This functionality allows you to Export to Word doc, HTML file, Rich Text file (RTF) and a few others.

So I choose to export to Word, picked where to save it and thought to myself, “Well this is an easy win”.

No such luck.

 

 

 

 

 

During the conversion, Adobe would crash. Every time.

And it didn’t matter what format I choose to export it; it crashed every time.

After countless fruitless attempts I remembered that not all PDFs are created equal.

Each PDF creation software does things are little differently. Some place images differently. Some manage the text layout differently.

I noticed that this particular PDF was not created in Adobe Acrobat.

I thought that if only this PDF was created in Adobe, then the conversion would work.

And then it hit me. Why don’t I just create this PDF in Adobe Acrobat!!!

I choose File > Print and Choose Adobe PDF from the list. I created another copy of the PDF and then opened that version in Acrobat.

This time when I attempted the Export it worked like a charm.

Formatting was a little off, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed. That’s just part of the conversion process.

Hope this helps you in your PDF to Word conversions.