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Participant
July 11, 2020
Question

I scan to PDF and then Export to Word but the resulting document is not editable

  • July 11, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 526 views

Hi.  I have Acrobat DC.  I am having a problem with one particular document conversion.  The paper version is mostly a simple table.  I scan it into a PDF and then use Export PDF to create an editable Word document.  This approach has worked OK for other documents but this one is not coming out right.  Parts of the table in Word are garbled and most of the table appears to be an image, rather than editable text.  Note it is the contents of the table I am trying to edit rather than the table itself.  I have converted two other documents that contain tables from paper to PDF to Word, and they have been editable.  I cannot see why this one doesn't work.

 

I have tried the following, in case it helped, but unfortunately it didn't make things better:

  1. Scanned to PDF
  2. Selected Edit PDF to try to get it to recognise text
  3. Then Export PDF to Word.

Doing it this way with the extra Edit PDF step made no difference.

 

Can anyone help?

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

JeffRUKAuthor
Participant
July 11, 2020

I am replying to my own post (talking to myself!).  I have found that if I Export PDF using the cloud based version, rather than using the Windows Acrobat Pro DC app, then it does produce an editable Word document, although it only does that if I give it one page of the document at a time.  So my question is now...

Why does the cloud version manage, albeit with the mentioned limitation, what the app doesn't?

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 11, 2020

Does the Recognize Text command work? Can you select the text after running it?

JeffRUKAuthor
Participant
July 16, 2020

I had not seen that command before, but unfortunately it does not appear to recognise the text by which I mean I cannot select the text afterwards.