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Old 02-21-2019, 09:25 AM
billbruen billbruen is offline Convert PDF to Word Windows 10 Convert PDF to Word Office 2007
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Can anyone suggest the best program to convert PDF to Word? The converted text must be copyable to a third party text program (HelpScribble).



Some of the conversions I've tried...once the conversion is complete, the text does not look like normal Word text and defies copy/paste.

Perhaps someone can suggest a way to achieve what I want to do, without using Word at all?
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Old 02-21-2019, 09:35 AM
Charles Kenyon Charles Kenyon is offline Convert PDF to Word Windows 10 Convert PDF to Word Office 2016
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Word 2007 does not have the tools built into it. Your scanner software may. It is called Optical Character Recognition (OCR). You can find tools online to do this as well.


Note, though, that converted files are never optimal.
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Old 02-21-2019, 10:00 AM
skeezix skeezix is offline Convert PDF to Word Windows 10 Convert PDF to Word Office 97-2003
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Deleted by OP.
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Old 02-21-2019, 10:51 AM
billbruen billbruen is offline Convert PDF to Word Windows 10 Convert PDF to Word Office 2007
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Thanks for your comment. Going to try later edition of Word.
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Old 02-21-2019, 01:09 PM
Moonshine Moonshine is offline Convert PDF to Word Windows 10 Convert PDF to Word Office 2016
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Give this online PDF to Word conversion site a try:

https://www.zamzar.com/convert/pdf-to-Word/

Step 1 – Choose files for the PDF for conversion
Step 2 – Convert to Docx
Step 3 – Convert
Step 4 – Files Uploading
Step 5 – File converting
Step 6 – File conversion complete - Download

Click the Download tab when converted and open in Word to see if the conversion is suitable and useable.



Note: PDFs that are complex, have different styles, fonts etc, include text boxes, lines/shapes and tables may not convert as required.
It should also be noted that not all PDFs are created and saved/printed the same way.
There are different types of PDF and if the PDF has been saved/printed as a PDF Image, then the characteristics of that PDF will resemble those of a Jpeg/Jpg image with no edible/copyable text.



Personally, I have never come across a PDF that couldn’t be edited, one way or another, but when you have to open PDFs in image editors to do the editing, it becomes very time consuming indeed.
You will have to try to see the outcome of your converted file(s) to see if it is usable.
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Old 02-21-2019, 03:02 PM
billbruen billbruen is offline Convert PDF to Word Windows 10 Convert PDF to Word Office 2007
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Thanks Moonshine.....I have used Zamzar before and will try it again.

I've got hold of Office 2019 now and was able to open a pdf file with it and convert/import it into Word.

It worked, but as you say, it was a complex pdf, so the Word interpretation of it was of mixed quality. Do you think I might get more joy if I looked into converting the pdf into other formats (HTML, RTF, text etc)?
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Old 02-22-2019, 01:32 AM
Moonshine Moonshine is offline Convert PDF to Word Windows 10 Convert PDF to Word Office 2016
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If it’s just the ability to copy any converted text and the precise layout/formatting of a converted document is not that important, then by all means give it a try. You have nothing to lose but time.

I often tell folks when tasks like this are undertaken, they have to consider how long the process will take to get a reasonable result.
If a great deal of time is needed (by editing) to produce that reasonable result, it can sometimes by quicker to manually type the text out yourself. I do appreciate that this does depend on typing skills/speed when this is attempted.
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Old 02-22-2019, 02:32 AM
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gmayor gmayor is offline Convert PDF to Word Windows 10 Convert PDF to Word Office 2016
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The whole point of PDF is that it is a graphical representation of a document. It is not meant to be edited. Depending on how it was made, recent Word versions can open it and make a stab at converting it to Word format, but the layout will be hit and miss.


Some OCR software can make a better stab at the job - e.g. Finereader is pretty good as such software goes, but converting graphics to editable text is never going to be easy and in a complex document probably impossible to recreate it as it was originally.
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Old 02-22-2019, 07:29 AM
kilroy kilroy is offline Convert PDF to Word Windows 10 Convert PDF to Word Office 2016
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Bill if your PDF reader has an "enhance scan" function like Adobe try running that first.
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