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F
frankb17149861
Participant
March 29, 2017
Question

PDF conversion to Word - Verbiage are all symbols

  • March 29, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 11972 views

I'm trying to convert a PDF file to Word but each time that I do it changes all of the words to symbols and numbers.

Can anyone help me out with this?

Regards,

Frank

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This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Dov Isaacs
Dov Isaacs
Legend
March 29, 2017

Very likely, the problem has to do with how the font used for that text was encoded within the PDF file when the PDF file was created. Standard encodings were most likely not used.

          - Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
F
frankb17149861Author
Participant
March 29, 2017

So here is my issue.

I flew to Colombia in order to get medical records for a child that was severely burned (Shirners is going to operate on the child free of charge). They gave me the records on a thumb drive. How can I fix this? The hospitals records department doesn't have a phone.

I need to convert the file in order to translate it.

L
lyndam72024751
Participant
June 23, 2024

If the conversion to Word is messed up due to the encoding, try copy and paste from the PDF file directly into an empty Word document. That may work.

If that doesn't work, another possibility would be, if you are running under Windows with Acrobat, to print to the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver and create a new PDF file from the old one. That might straighten out the encoding.

Let us know if one or the other of these solves your problem.

          - Dov


This happened to me but I was able to use the approach above (print to Adobe post script printer) and convert that to Word, and it worked. Thatnk  you for explaining this solution to my problem.

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