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Re: Exporting to Word from PDF using Acrobat 6

Subject: Re: Exporting to Word from PDF using Acrobat 6
From: Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2003 11:04:39 -0400


Emily,

A PDF is not a document.

_Some_ PDFs are simple enough that Acrobat can guess at the order of elements the author intended and then output a decent RTF rendition.

_Some_ PDFs actually have structure information embedded (an optional feature you can turn on in the PDFMaker Word macro.

_Many_ PDFs are sufficiently complex or are created in a way that Acrobat can only guess--and guess badly--what text goes where.

So the answer is It depends. It is always best to work from the source document, but when you get a PDF from someone outside your organization, exporting it to Word is quite iffy, as you may have no idea how they created it in the first place (from what application, with what options enabled, etc.).

Dick

Emily Berk wrote:

I'm almost positive that I was able to export PDF files to Word using Acrobat 5 without a problem.

But I just installed Acrobat 6 (and it seems to have uninstalled Acrobat 5) and now when I try to Save As ... a PDF into Word, it generates -- random strings from the PDF into Word, but nothing else. (Same for RTF)

When I re-generate the PDF to be Acrobat 3-compatible, Acrobat 6 seems to generate a few additional strings into the Word document, but not many.

Has anyone else experienced this very unpleasant phenomenon? Have you been able to solve this problem?

Please respond directly, as I am on digest.

--Emily



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