Including header when saving as Plain Text

[catflap]

Hi




I have a word 2013 doc with a sequential number preceded by an underscore in the header of each page. When I save as Plain Text these headers do not appear in the file.


I need this text to come through as I'm going to be using it for another process afterwards.


Is there any way to keep the header when I export as text?


Failing that, is there a way to move the header to the top of the body text for each page without doing it manually? (it's possible there will be several thousand pages to work with).


Thanks for reading!

[Charles Kenyon]

Try, as an intermediate step, saving as pdf. Then convert the pdf to plain text. (I do not know how to do this but assume there is a method.)



The structure of Word documents is such that the headers and footers are not part of the text and page numbers are not fixed until the document is printed.

[catflap]

Hi Charles


Thanks for your reply.


Odd you should suggest saving to pdf because this word doc has been created by Acrobat. I didn't giove all details of what I'm doing to keep the query simple, but if it helps to know, this is it:



What I've been given is a pdf of letters - one per page, several thousand pages for some files. In Acrobat Pro DC I've been cropping to the address area, and then adding a header. I then export to Word, and in turn save as plain text.


I can't export to Plain text directly from Acrobat as it seems to mess up some of the characters, but going via Word usually works OK.


The weird thing is that sometimes the header comes through into word as part of the body text (which is what I want), but for some pdfs it comes through as a header, which I then can't include if I save as text.


With all this in mind, I don't think going back to pdf format is the answer.


Any other thoughts please?

[macropod]

Header & footer content are liable to be saved after all the body content when you save a document as a plain text file. Headers & footers, as such, don't exist in a plain text file.

[catflap]

Hi Macropod


I've seen headers appear after the rest of the data before, but it doesn't seem to happen in this case - they don't seem to appear at all, so it must be some sort of difference in formatting or some such.



If we accept that there's no way to get headers to export as text, is the alternative of moving the header to the top of the body text before exporting possible? - preferably without using vba as I need some of my non-technical colleague to be able to use the files.


I've attached a test doc if it helps (with some body text and a page number in the header).

[macropod]

If your document has Section breaks, the header/footer content may appear where those used to be.

Moving the headers/footers into the document body before the export can be done manually, or via a macro. Since only one instance of each header & footer exists in each Section, you're not going to get one with page #s for every page unless you copy the relevant headers/footers to every page in the Section.

[catflap]

Hi Macropod


Thanks for reply - it sounds like I need a rethink on this. I'll try and work something else out.


Cheers