Exporting a PDF to Word Document Removes All Periods from Text

Report · May 14, 2021

When I export a Word document from a PDF in Acrobat Pro, the resulting Word document text is missing all periods (".") All other punctuation like commas and colons seem unaffected.

I've attached a sample paragraph, highlighting one of the missing periods. The document is about 200 pages long and all periods are missing.

The original document was created in InDesign, so I can adjust the PDF export settings from there if need be. I'm using Acrobat Pro DC 2021.

Any suggestions for mitigtating this problem would be much appreciated.

Report · May 18, 2021

The most important thing when exporting the PDF from InDesign is to ensure "Include Tagged Text" is ON in the export PDF dialog box. Without that, exports from Acrobat will be garbage.

However, what you're describing sounds different. This is very odd.

Just wondering: Why are you exporting to PDF and then to Acrobat-toWord? Why not export an RTF file direclty from InDesign?

Report · May 18, 2021

Thanks for the suggestion David. Unfortunatley it looks like I already had that PDF option checked.

The document is about 200 pages, it's a novel. It was printed as a book a couple of years ago, and now the author would like to make several edits, and requested Word format. We are trying to keep the layout / page numbers similar to the InDesign document, but perhaps this is the wrong approach.

Regarding RTF format, I only see that as an export option when I have text selected. There are many many text frames in the INDD file, so not sure this would work. Is there a way to export the entire doc as an RTF in one go?

To be honest I don't think I'm going to solve this one, it seems like an anomoly. I have already started copying text from InDesign and pasting into word, using similar margins and page size in Word... that seems to be the best option at this point... kind of annoying though!

Report · May 18, 2021

There are tools that let you batch export all the stories, such as the ExportAllStories script that comes with InDesign:

https://creativepro.com/exporting-all-stories-text-rtf/

There's also third-party tools, such as Text Exporter:

https://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/indesign-downloads/textexporter-4/