Converting PDF to Word, formatting issues

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
March 17, 2019
2 replies
67642 views

When i convert PDF's to Word files, i am often left with large blank areas in the document that i cannot fill in by trying to delete the space. I have also tried getting rid of the formatting on the document, but it does nothing. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Edit and convert PDFs

A

Aaron25082434kshg

Participant

I'm sure you have finished this project by now... but one strange issue I am having currently.

My mother is an author, I am a typographer so naturally I will be working on her novel as well.
She sent her novel to a well known editor for about 1000 dollars about 6 or so months ago.
when she sent the document back she sent it in pdf form. At the time I was busy with another project,

so my brother converted her pdf file back into a docx file. My mother then proceeded to making changes and corrections suggested by the editor. Then she noticed something wrong...
She came across two words shoved together... when she tried to fix that the words would not seperate. after pressing space bar a few times all the letters would scrunch together and look very odd like foreign writing. She found that it was better for her to highlight the two words and delete them then retype them... at that point the problem would shift down to a nother set of words... Creating a whole new problem to fix. She's been working on this for a while. I finally finished my other project and told her to send the novel to me to figure out.
What I found...
If I copy the words in question. Example... "Comeon!" and paste them into notepad... copy it back out and into word.
the problem would be "cleaned"... Thus I told her abort fixing the space issues (which there are many of them) Continue placing the suggestions made by the editor and deleting their correction marks. Note all paragraph breaks and art and all things such as fonts and font parameters... (as those do not retain after the notepad cleaning) ... I could then, copy the entire novel into Notepad and "clean" the issue. This has become our plan of attack.
Lesson learned... only send basic text to editors to work on. rather than novels with images and basic formating...

A

Aaron25082434kshg

Participant

BTW i know this is technically a different problem but similarly caused by DOCX > PDF > DOCX

try67

Community Expert

How are you converting the files, exactly?

zachy5803127Author

Participating Frequently

With the PDF open i go to File--> export to--> Microsoft Word-->Word Document

jane-e

Community Expert

ACK! i dont know why, but there is no tiny arrow on mine!

zachy5803127 wrote
I dont know why, but there is no tiny arrow on mine!

Hi Zach,

It’s called the Dialog Box Launcher. If your Home tab on the Ribbon doesn’t look like this, let us know. For more informaion, see the Microsoft Help page:

Ribbons - Windows applications | Microsoft Docs

When you convert from PDF to Word, what do you pick in the Settings dialog? One says Flowing Text and the other says Retain Existing Format (that one creates frames.)

Be cautious about deleting those section breaks. Word does not have page formatting — it only has section formatting. By default every document has one section until more are added. You can see the number in the status bar.

Section formatting includes margins, columns, headers, footers, page numbering, page size, etc. When you delete a section break, you combine two sections and will lose the section (page) formatting on the first. It may or may not make a difference with your specific document, but just be cautious.

Jane

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