Missing text when converting to PDF from Word

[Janette5FF0]

When I convert a Microsoft Word document to a PDF (using both Create PDF in the Acrobat tab and File > Save as Adobe PDF) I am missing some of the text in the PDF, such as a paragraph or some of the list items. I've tried deleting the content in Word and pasting it back unformatted, entering a blank line before the missing paragraph, and converting the list into normal style and then applying the list paragraph style. Sometime soem of the content would appear in the PDF and sometimes it would cause neighbouring content to not appear in the PDF. Has anyone encountered this before? Does anyone have any suggestions?

Janette

[radzmar]

Try to print the Word file with the Adobe PDF printer instead.

[Janette5FF0]

Thank you for your suggestion. It created a PDF with all the text content visible, but no tags. Now I need to tag the whole document, but at least it gives me a possibility of creating an accessible PDF version of my document.

I wonder why that worked and the other two ways. Strange.

[lisa mariee52797052]

I was able to get the tags (links) for the TOC by going to File Save as Adobe PDF.

[Abambo]

I've seen this before. There was a whole paragraph missing. Deleting the paragraph marker or adding a second paragraph marker helped, but obviously destroyed the layout. Save as PDF (Word version of PDF creator) worked and as the document was simple straight 2 pages only, this was fine for my contact.

[Janette5FF0]

I've seen it with both PDF Creator and Save as PDF. I had content in 3-column layout with an image in the left column. The first line of the content in the centre column would not appear. Changing the wrapping option of the image worked. It really is trial and error and then hoping that the content will appear upon conversion to a PDF.

[Abambo]

I've seen it with both PDF Creator and Save as PDF.

By @Janette5FF0

That looks horribly like a Microsoft Word bug. As Save as PDF uses Microsoft implemented functionality and Save as Adobe PDF and Acrobat⇾Create PDF are using Adobe's implementation, it may well be that the data transferred to both functions are already bad.

[lisa mariee52797052]

Have just started experiencing the the same problem about two weeks ago (at least that's when I noticed it). Hate to think I sent something to a client w/ missing headings and/or text. As you pointed out, the suggestion about just doing file print to Adobe pdf doesn't help with a TOC and lists of tables and figures. Made sure my Acrobat is up to date (it is/was) and "create Adobe pdf" still doesn't work from a Word document. Ugh!

[Janette5FF0]

I started checking meticulously each document that I'm converting into a PDF. Of course by doing so I realized that it is happening even with less complex and shorter documents. Found a few things that sometimes work. If there is an image around the text that disappears on conversion to a PDF, try changing the wrapping option from In Line with Text or don't use a soft return. I've had to insert a hard return (and reduce the size of it) in order to make the text appear in the PDF. Perhaps if more people report this issue, then Adobe will be able to advise on what to do or why this is happening.

[oylaura]

Thanks for this! Very helpful - I wonder what happened to cause it as it hasn't been happening until recently.

You made my day!

[Karen2244545949sz]

I have just had the same problem. It did work when using the Save As function within Word but not using the Acrobat tab or the pint to file using Adobe PDF as the printer. With mine I was missing text after 2 pictures. I tried copying and pasting as a picture, inserting the pictures as png then jpg, the same text was missing when converting to PDF. The last thing that I tried was I changed the text wrapping from 'In Line with Text' to 'Top and Bottom' and then it worked. Luckily this was only a 20 page document but unfortunately I have a 400 page document with around 80 figures or so to convert in the next week or so. It is going to be very, very painful having to go back through the document and change the text wrapping of them all.

[L2308503580vr]

Thank you for this. The solution of changing from inline to top and bottom worked for me. Even though I like that less I much rather have the end-result look as I needed. I was getting pretty annoyed. If I used Adobe (whether from within Word or Acrobat) to transform the word document to a PDF I had whole chunks of text missing. From within Word I could go to Save As > PDF and bypass Adobe altogether. But, for some reason the images were pixelated/blurry this way. I went through the Options under Save As > PDF and adjusted anything related to images to try to get a clear picture, but no luck. I felt like I was stuck with having missing text but crisp images or no-missing text and blurry images. Sigh. I was banging my head since both were necessary for my project. Thanks again. 

[Cristina235244162py8]

This solution also worked for me! Thanks for sharing it!

However, indeed, we cannot constantly be checking that Adobe converted the Word document properly, that's insane. For me, saving the Word doc as a PDF through the Save As option can solve the issue, but I realised that the PDF created with that option is non-searchable, and everything appears as it was an image. Hope that Adobe can solve this issue because it's quite time-consuming to be checking that the text has been transferred to the PDF.

[Pamela22533676qyqc]

I am having this same issue when I convert from Word to Adobe.  Official government documents cannot be missing information, so I hope Adobe issue gets fixed soon!!

[SNRockyMtns]

Having the same issue with a resume. The text was there in the pdf previously and it is now missing a job title in the pdf. Tried everything to fix it in word and re-save. Nothing seems to be working.

[Janette5FF0]

Hi. I've tried a variety of fixes and one that seems to work at times is to enter a blank line in between the text that is missing and the text that follows it. I then minimize the spacing and font that is used in the blank line. Save it and try converting it to PDF again. If nothing works, then you may have to save it by printing to Adobe PDF. This will give you an untagged PDF, which then needs to be tagged. If the resume is not too long and complex, then autotag in Adobe Acrobat will be a good start. You most likely will have to make adjustments to create a PDF that is PDF-UA compliant. Good luck.

[Lew Yedwab, Resideo]

I have had this problem very frequently for the last couple of years with documents of more than 2-5 pages. Until recently, just making one or two more tries at the PDF made the problem go away. For the last 2 months or so, the problem has stopped going away and now occurs with every PDF I make. 

My manager suggested a workaround that works every time, to my surprise. Before making a PDF, I save a copy of the Word document in the old .doc format (as opposed to .docx) and make the PDF from that. Works every time, with all jumps and links intact and working and with PDF bookmarks made correctly.

Really strange. 

[Adrean22734706todu]

The .doc format worked for me too, lost some minor formatting by changing the file type, but this is better than losing content or links in the final .PDF. 

Thanks for the work-around! Would be better if the Save-As .PDF tool/plugin worked instead.

[veeras43732735]

I've been having this same issue lately. It started with an application letter that was in table format. I tried merging cells and formatting the table differently but some text would always be missing from one part of the document. The weird thing is the same file converted to PDF just fine some weeks earlier. The only solution I could find at the time was using Word's own print to PDF option, but it doesn't render the icons in the document as well as Acrobat so it's not ideal.

I then noticed the same issue with pictures in longer documents. Most pictures had disappeared along with some captions. Not ideal for user manuals...

Saving the file as .doc before converting worked for me, although once again the icons in the document are not rendered perfectly and some of the formatting changed. I hope this issue is solved ASAP so I don't have to worry about accidentally sending customers manuals without pictures.

[Janette5FF0]

Update on this issue. I am still encountering this problem of missing text when converting Word documents into PDF, but have found that removing soft returns helps. When I'm creating a guide on how to do something in a list format with a screenshot for the different steps, I  use a soft return to add the image followed by a hard return to continue the steps. Using the soft returns, increases the chance of encountering missing text in the PDF. Not using the soft returns means that I have to fix the tagging in the PDF, but at least all of the content is there. 

[TCWaldron]

THANK YOU! This EXACTLY fixed my issue. I, too, am making a step-by-step guide and was using soft returns to include the screenshots in the steps. Once I used a hard return to separate the images from the paragraphs, all my text showed up in the PDF conversion. Not sure if the glitch is a fault of Word or Adobe, but hope it gets sorted out soon.

[EricMS]

Same issue within our company and it has been driving us crazy!

We can't use the MS PDF driver (File > Save As > PDF) as it will not carry over any headings that we want to be included in the PDF bookmarks if those headings are in a text box, table, or within the document header. It also limits the quality/compression/color and other output settings that the Adobe PDF driver provides. And printing to a PDF obviously doesn't work for us either since none of the bookmarks, hyperlinks, etc are transferred over. We send 99% of our PDFs to clients electronically so these elements are important to us and we don't have time to manually add them in in our fast-paced work environment.

Our text dropping issue happens (it seems) only with two column documents that contain section breaks or images and captions put into empty 1-column 2-row tables (photos and graphics in the top cell and a caption in the bottom cell). If we remove the section breaks, then the text does not drop out. Or if we text frames instead of tables for the photos/graphics and captions, then the problem also goes away. But we work with tens of thousands of legacy documents that we continually dupe and revise so that is also not practical to redo every time.

I've reported this to Adobe and Microsoft tech support but as you can imagine both sides blame the other. Microsoft said "use our driver -- it is optimized for Office documents..." and Adobe recommends "print to PDF" which as we know does not support the links, bookmarks, etc. 

Saving the XML format DOCX files down to DOC may fix the issue as a workaround, but it introduces other issues including differences in kerning with some fonts and other formatting and feature replacements (some shapes and text boxes convert to effects, text effects are removed, SVG graphics get converted to PNG, etc.) We use SVG for all of our Adobe Illustrator graphics since they convert to vector in the PDF and produce much better quality than a raster format like JPG or PNG.

We are using the latest build of both Microsoft 365 and Adobe Acrobat DC. 

[Janette5FF0]

I thought I was imagining the lower quality of images (especially logos) when converting to PDF. Interesting that you are finding that as well. On the positive side is that at least we are aware of what is happening and checking the PDF. Imagine those that don't realize it and share incomplete documents. I'm still using the Microsoft 2016 and have the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. So, perhaps it is an issue with Adobe. In any case, Let's hope that Microsoft and Adobe take this issue seriously and find a fix.

[EricMS]

This is slightly off-topic, but we use SVG instead of JPG and PNG graphics for all of our simple graphics (specifically logos, symbols, smaller infographics, etc.) which is supported in Office 365. In other words, if the native file is already in vector format (as an AI or EPS in Illustrator format for example), we export to SVG and then that stays as vector through the entire conversion process from Word to PDF. Those elements can be scaled up to any size without loss in quality (unless of course there is a photo (bitmap) inside the graphic in which case that will degrade as it gets enlarged). But for simple graphics and client/partner logos, it works great. If you have a lot of these in the document, the resulting Word file will also be much smaller (if those graphics don't contain a lot of text). 

In Illustrator, when you export to SVG there are some settings you need to make in order for the compatibility to be seamless:

• Use SVG 1.1
• Type - Convert to outline (makes a larger file but guarantees the text layout, kerning, fonts, are not messed up if another user does not have the same font)
• Image Location: Embed
• CSS Properties: Presentation Attributes
• Decimal Places: 3 (higher number produces more "nodes" in the curves but results in a larger file size)
• Enable "Responsive" checkbox

Unfortunately Word (so far) doesnot support the compressed SVG format.

Previously, we exported to EMF since older versions of Word did not support SVG. Since we changed to these vector formats, clients have noticed the huge improvement with legibility in our graphics when we give them our PDF files. 

[Guodong_abr]

I changed acrobat from 2021 to older version.Acrobat_DC_C_2020.013.20074.

Problem solved.

Maybe because the pdf maker of version 2021 had some bugs inside.