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Wednesday, May 9, 2012

PDF to Word Document Problems & Solutions

Had hectic day at work today! Everybody and their buddy wanted me to help them! Multi-tasked to the max today!
One of the things I had to do was convert a PDF document to a Word document.
Sounds easy right? Well usually when I convert documents, it goes ok. There are some funky things going on with the formatting but nothing too horrible.
Well this was horrible.
I couldn't convert because of some stupid error talking about not having a font? Which was dumb because I had the font. Calibri. How do I know that it was Calibri? Because it's the default font in Microsoft Word now and it's been that way for awhile, so I know what it looks like now. So that was stupid.
I tried copying and pasting and that went ar-tarded. Every word had a line break.
So I went ahead and found an online PDF to Word converter and did it that way. It converted it. Thank goodness, because I was doing this for a man who is like the mega big boss of where I work.
I found it dumb how I have the Adobe Acrobat X Pro.

Even though it converted, it still had formatting problems.
All of the spaces between words were either double or triple spaced.
The margins were insanely off.
There were line breaks at random areas.
The footer and header were being dumb.

So to get this fixed, this is what I did:

Deleted all header and footers.
Got rid of the line breaks (there were a lot but not unbearable).

What got me stumped was how the hell do I fix the double and triple spaced words and the stupid margins? I know what you're thinking, margins? You had a problem with the margins? Do you know how easy it is to fix that?
Yes...yes I do. BUT when I tried to change the margins, it would give me some stupid error and not change it.

Like a normal person, I googled the answer to the double and triple spacing problems. Thankfully, I found it. I forgot where. I did intense searching and found it in a forum. I give credit to whoever the hell gave this advice:
Go to REPLACE.
In the FIND WHAT box, enter in two spaces: "  "
In the REPLACE WITH box, enter in one space: " "
Hit REPLACE ALL and it will solve the double-spacing problem.
I did this for triple spacing "   " and replaced all. Sometimes it does not make all of the replacing it needs to actually do the double-spacing replacing about three times until it says that it made 0 replacements.

After this space replacing solution, I highlighted all of the pages and put normal margins. For some odd reason, the spacing solved the weird margin thing.

You might also notice that some letters looks "squished". This is normal when you convert a PDF to a document.
To fix this:
Select the whole document, meaning every page.
Right-click and choose FONT.
Go to the ADVANCED tab.
You'll see "SCALE" and then a blank drop down box to the right of it.
In the drop-down box and choose 100%.
Click OK.

I found out this problem through manual troubleshooting. I just highlighted the squished letter and found out what the hell is wrong with the font and found that the scale is set to 50% so setting the scale to 100% should work.
So far, this made the document look almost "normal".

Bullet lists aren't bulleted, the bullet symbol are texts so you can delete it like a normal letter and if you enter a new line, the next line will not have a bullet symbol (since it has been converted to normal text, like when you insert a degree sign from the "Insert Symbol" window).

There are some lines that are centered aligned rather than left aligned, but those lines were mostly the lines that were ar-tardedly converted with unecessary line breaks, so it was easy to find and fix since it's along the journey or fixing the line breaks.

I hope the whole font error gets fixed with the newer version of Adobe Acrobat -__-;;
If I can't convert with the actual program and have to resort to some site on Google, that's just sad.

Hopefully someone finds this useful. I had to do a lot of Googling to take care of these simple problems.

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