Hello, Sir Paul --

Thanks for the prompt response.

I have an HP All-in-One Printer (7200 series), and I used its HP Solution Center software to scan the document to a searchable .pdf file. I read this document into Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard, and performed a Save As to a Word .doc file. This I read into Word 2010 and converted to a .docx file.

Per your suggestion, I went the route (using the HP Solution Center software) of saving the file as a "Text (OCR) to rich text (rtf)" format. I then read this file in to Word 2010, and saved it as a .docx file. The quality of Adobe's conversion to Word of the original .pdf file was far superior to the .rtf route described. The editing for a 25-page document was considerably less tedious, despite some of the lightened characters. There was still some minor abnormal shading of characters, using the .rtf format route, although somewhat better than that experienced in the Adobe route.

However, I still may be missing something from the description that you provided.

Gordon