export to Word or Pages PROBLEMS1!! MAC

Question

I have a large manuscript which I have scanned as a PDF

I open it in Acrobat and it looks fine. I have the most up to date version of Acrobat

I have tried optimizing it, making it searchable, and exporting it into Word. I have the most uptodate Word for my Mac running Sonoma 14.5

No matter what I do, the Word document hangs. I try to go through the document and get the beachball repeatedly.

There's no way to export it from PDF into Pages directly, so I export it into RTF

Unfortunately, the formatting goes a little crazy in RTF

I can, however, import the RTF into Pages and NO hangs, just the occasionally screwy formatting it inherited from RTF. And that requires a lot of retyping.

This is a big manuscript. Is there anyway to turn the PDF into a Word or Pages document without going through the RTF fiasco?

straightlife · Accepted Answer

thanks so much. Some of the problems might be with RAM. I have 192 gigs. The guy who scanned the 500 pages, broke it into parts for me, but the parts are pretty big. What I finally did was open the lagging Word document with PAGES. Pages has no trouble with it. at all. So maybe not a memory problem, or maybe I haven't allocated enought to Word? Anyway. A solution has been found. Output to Word and open the Word doc in Pages.

gary_sc · Answer

Hi, @straightlife, Yes, and/or no, and/or Maybe.

There are a number of things going for you and/or against you. The top two are the quality of your scan and the amount of ram in your Mac.

In regards to ram, split the document into two, four, or more pieces, convert to Word, If it works, then ram was that issue.

As far as the scan goes, we are continually given the impression that anything that can be done on the computer should be great. Well, I do not know what you know about photography, but the standard understanding is that you can make a good photo great, but you cannot make a bad photo (out of focus, bad lighting, multiple colorcasts in the same image, etc.) even good. I do not know HOW you scanned your document, or what the quality of your scanner was, but the better both are, the better the quality of the scan. If you scanned and ran the OCR without any quality improvement of the image, you will not get great quality out.

In addition, I also do not know what the quality of your original document was. If it was in poor condition, you cannot make a good scan out of it. You can make it "better," but never good.

Here is a blog I wrote for Adobe on this subject. If you have any questions after reading this, just ask:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/adobe-community-professionals/scanning-clean-searchable-pdfs/m-p/4785435?page=1#M89

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