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Old 11-26-2014, 01:37 PM
Colonel Biggs Colonel Biggs is offline Printing text clearly when converted from a .pdf file Windows 8 Printing text clearly when converted from a .pdf file Office 2010 64bit
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I am using Office 2010. I have scanned a document, and have saved it as a .pdf file. Then, in Adobe, I converted the file to a Word file. The conversion went okay, although some of the characters are not crisp, as if one were preparing the document in Word to begin with. Is there a way to sharpen the characters in Word without specifying that they be bold-faced?

Gordon
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Old 11-26-2014, 05:21 PM
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Your description suggests you've only inserted the scanned page images into Word. To get the text, you actually need to run an OCR process on the scanned page images (you can do this with Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 [available as a free download from http://www.techspot.com/downloads/4683-adobe-acrobat-8-free.html - note the serial# mentioned there], or with the OCR packages that come with many scanners), then insert the text into Word. The inserted text will have all the qualities of normal text in a document. Do note that OCR conversions often require some post-conversion editing to correct OCR errors.
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Old 11-26-2014, 08:24 PM
Colonel Biggs Colonel Biggs is offline Printing text clearly when converted from a .pdf file Windows 8 Printing text clearly when converted from a .pdf file Office 2010 64bit
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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
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Old 11-26-2014, 08:58 PM
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A searchable .pdf file is one that has had an OCR conversion done, but the original scanned image sits in front of the text, so the appearance remains unchanged. If you save such as file as a Word document, you'll end up with the same arrangement in the document. What you'll see is the scanned images, not the text. To see the text, you'd delete the scanned images.

Assuming that saving the file as a "Text (OCR) to rich text (rtf)" format outputs just the text, any differences in characters will be because of the fonts and/or point sizes used, apart from what you'd expect via bold/italics. You can clear all of this via Ctrl-A, then Ctrl-Space and Ctrl-Q. Apart from whatever formatting belongs to the various paragraph Styles, any shading, bold, italics, etc. should all disappear.
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Old 11-26-2014, 09:51 PM
Colonel Biggs Colonel Biggs is offline Printing text clearly when converted from a .pdf file Windows 8 Printing text clearly when converted from a .pdf file Office 2010 64bit
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I tried this approach on my Adobe-to-Word converted document, and it performed exactly as you indicated - sharp, clear text. Unfortunately, one heck of a lot of re-formatting comes with the job, so I suppose that it is a matter of aesthetics versus efficiency!

Thanks for your inputs - most helpful!
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Old 11-26-2014, 10:01 PM
Colonel Biggs Colonel Biggs is offline Printing text clearly when converted from a .pdf file Windows 8 Printing text clearly when converted from a .pdf file Office 2010 64bit
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Follow-up:

If one highlights just sections of the text, and then uses Control + space, but not the Control + Q function, one achieves the character clarity, and does not lose the formatting. What is the purpose of the Control + Q entry?

GB
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Old 11-26-2014, 10:04 PM
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Ctrl-Space removes any character-level formatting (e.g. bold, italic) that doesn't match the paragraph Style.

Ctrl-Q removes any paragraph-level formatting (e.g. indents, alignment) that doesn't match the paragraph Style.
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