"Train" Acrobat Pro DC to recognize slashed zero while converting to Excel

[jaro123-216Fdi]

Dear Community,

we need to convert hundreds of pages of printed tables containing mostly numbers into Excel-Sheets, for which I use Acrobat Pro DC. Unfortunately, the tables contain the common "slashed zero" (a zero with a diagonal slash in it) representing the number zero to distinguish it from the letter O. Apparently, Acrobat Pro does not know this symbol and converts it into several diffent random combinations of special characters. As it does not use a consistent conversion, I can not use "search and replace" to handle the issue as it comes up with countless variations while converting the slashed zero which means we have to correct the numbers manually.

Is there an optional recognition of the slashed zero somewhere in the settings or a way to tell Acrobat Pro DC to convert a certain symbol always into a certain number (in the sense of  "see this, always convert it to 0")?

Any help would be very much appreciated. Strangely, I tried some of the free online converters of which one by itself converted slashed zero to zero but I can not use those to handle classified data. Therefore, I hope Acrobat Pro is also capable of it.

best regards,

jaro

[try67 · Accepted solution]

No, there's no way to "train" Acrobat to identify (or not identify) a character as something else.

You need to look for solutions after the text has been extracted from the PDF, like a Perl script to do a search and replace, or even an Office macro.