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a_high_tower
Participant
December 31, 2016
Question

from .docx to .pdf to .docx again, formatting problems with re-reconverted doc

  • December 31, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 717 views

I converted a Word doc to PDF, then back to Word again, and all of my original formatting has been replaced. Specifically, I wrote everything in text boxes to format it easily and correctly, which are now gone. Particularly, I also added guide lines to help me separate and organize the information, which I now cannot edit, at all.

Would appreciate some help or advice along the lines of how to get my original formatting back, or how to edit the lost formatting, because surely even a converted Word document has some way to remove or change a random line in the middle of the page?

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1 reply

CtDave
CtDave
Participating Frequently
January 1, 2017

Just an observation.

Adobe Acrobat Reader (any version/release) cannot create PDF, export PDF page content to some other (supported) format or edit/manipulate PDF page content.

Mention this because you've asked your question in the "Reader" user forum.

Contemporary releases of Reader provide "links" to Adobe's Acrobat Document Cloud online subscription services. If one has an active (paid up) subscription then PDF files can be uploaded to have subsets of the features provided by the desktop application (not free like Reader) Adobe Acrobat (Pro or Standard).


So, to have a PDF output from Word whilst only having Reader installed the PDF creation process is totally a Microsoft process.

To export the PDF back to Word you'd use the desktop application Adobe Acrobat Pro or the appropriate Document Cloud subscription.  Export is optimal if using a well-formed Tagged PDF (ISO 14289-1, PDF-UA compliant).
Regardless, export is "moving" the textual content not the graphic elements of lines, etc (although graphic images can be exported).

An export of Western language types is typically top down from left to right. Text boxes  can be expected to be ignored going from Word to PDF -- the PDF can be expected to have the textual content "pulled" by the top down, left to right parsing of the Word file.

To "separate" content in Word consider using Word's built in column creation process.
To establish content flow with format consider appropriate use of Words "Styles" and Headings. For white space between lines and paragraphs consider use of Words built in Styles / Headings configuration features (avoid use of the Enter/Return & Tab keys to "format" -- 'cause they don't provide any of that actually.

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