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Participating Frequently
April 15, 2019
Answered

Show hidden Text in PDF

  • April 15, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 22565 views

Hello everyone

I have a word file (Office Word 365) where the text was flagged as hidden in some of the cells in a table.

I didn't realized that, and used it.

When people saved it as PDF, the text inside those cells disappeared. I now have only the PDF files.

Is there a way to restore this information from the PDF files?

(I tried already with some preflight options, but that didnt work.)

Any ideas?

Thx for any help.

Correct answer Dov Isaacs

If text is “hidden” in an Office document, it is not sent out either via a print path or a PDF creation path. If you request that text be hidden, that is exactly what you got. That hidden text is absolutely not in the PDF file and there is nothing you can do with the PDF file itself to retrieve that text.

(Note that this is very different from having text in an Office document covered by some other graphic object in which case you might be able to retrieve such text by deleting the object over the text in Acrobat Pro DC.)

          - Dov

1 reply

Dov Isaacs
Dov IsaacsCorrect answer
Legend
April 15, 2019

If text is “hidden” in an Office document, it is not sent out either via a print path or a PDF creation path. If you request that text be hidden, that is exactly what you got. That hidden text is absolutely not in the PDF file and there is nothing you can do with the PDF file itself to retrieve that text.

(Note that this is very different from having text in an Office document covered by some other graphic object in which case you might be able to retrieve such text by deleting the object over the text in Acrobat Pro DC.)

          - Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
LanidelAuthor
Participating Frequently
April 16, 2019

Dear Dov Isaacs

Yeah, that is what I thought.

Thx for your quick answer.

Cheers