scanning a document and converted to windows gives garbled results

[thebigvee]

I was in conversation with Sara Forsberg on Friday and she was helping me find out why the document I scanned and converted to Word came out garbled and uneditable. Somehow we got disconnected and she never followed up on my message. How do I get this relationship back?

[Sara_Forsberg]

Hi there, I'm back. I'm sorry that I overlooked your response. I found your file on Acrobat.com and was able to convert it successfully from Reader by disabling Optical Character Recognition. (I also did a Save As in Acrobat to save as Word with equally good results.)

Here are the instructions for disabling OCR: How to disable Optical Character Recognition (OCR) when converting PDF to Word or Excel.

I'm also happy to send the converted file back your way, if you'd like me to do that. Let me know. I'll watch for your response.

Again, my apologies for losing your post in the shuffle.

Best,

Sara

[thebigvee]

Yes, but now I can't edit it...change font etc. Can I enable OCR once it's converted to word?

[Sara_Forsberg]

Hi again,

That's the tricky part. Disabling OCR can help when there are font-related issues. But you're right, if you start with a scanned document, disabling OCR is going to leave you with a PDF that doesn't have editable text. It truly is a matter of the quality of the original file dictating the quality of the conversion.

As far as I know, you can't perform OCR in Word. You can, however, perform OCR on a scanned document using Acrobat. So, that may be an option for you. You may want to give Acrobat a try--you can download a free 30-day trial. (To perform OCR, you choose Tools > Document Processing > Optimize Scanned PDF, and make sure that Make Searchable is selected.)

I hope that helps.

Best,

Sara