Improving PDF Quality before creating word file

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
December 29, 2020
3 replies
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I work in a language department and we do not always get in high quality PDFs. We need to convert the PDFs to Word files before we are able to bring into the translation program we utilize.

I am trying to find a way to improve low quality PDFs. We are not always able to ask for a better scan or new PDF created file.

Right now I utilize Acrobat Pro 2017 and the Enhance file option before Exporting out as a Word file.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, even if it is for a different program that could assist with this..

Edit and convert PDFs

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Dov Isaacs

Legend

The bottom line here is GIGO => Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Obviously, if your clients (?) can provide you with “live” documents, not scans thrown into a PDF file, your life will improve dramatically.

@JR Boulay's recommendation can assist in terms of some form of recognition of the document's layout elements that might improve the export to .docx format.

There are some heavy duty OCR programs out there that may be able to assist either by ingesting the PDF and producing better text results or by outputting .docx directly. Or you may find some such software that you can feed .tif files of each PDF page to yielding .docx.

Good luck. This isn't an easy problem to resolve.

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)

gary_sc

Community Expert

Unfortunately if the scan was of poor quality, the PDF will be of poor quality. Yes, you can do the tag approach mentioned above but that's about it.

I do not know how complex your documents are but if they come into Word very broken you might want to convert them into simple text and then redo the intended formatting in Word. It might be faster. As far as other programs, sorry I really do not know of any.

Good luck

D

David_LeonAuthor

Participant

Gary--thanks---some are simple files and some can be over 25 pages with images and tables. Those always seem to create issues. They also come to me in several different languages--Euro and Asian.