change pdf to word faulty

[in_a_hurry]

Hello,

when i want to change a pdf to word, the output is not useble. The original text is viewed behind the letters (shadow).



Is there anything to do about this?

Regards
in_a_hurry

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello, in_a_hurry

When we convert to Word, we retain the content as is, so this is very likely expected (if I could see the file I could confirm with certainty, but below is my hypothesis, based on the screenshot, and numerous past cases).

What you are seeing usually indicates that the document was image based (likely a scanned file) and had an invisible text layer, which we made visible, because of this option, in the convert to word settings:

image.png

Disabling that option should stop the text overlap appearance you see on the word output. However, it will not make what is visible into editable text, it will just ensure the text content that is present remains transparent, so you are only able to see the image content in the word file.

If you need the word document to be fully editable, you will need to first use our Enhanced OCR to generate "Editable text", without ignoring the existing page text (thus, ensuring it gets overwritten by the OCR process), so that you only have a single object at that position, and it is editable text, prior to the conversion.

To do this:
1. Open the PDF document, and click "OCR Pages". Note that you do need an Editor Plus license to complete this process.
2. Ensure "Ignore existing text" is unchecked, and the output type is "Editable text and images" as below:

image(1).png

3. Click OK, and wait for the processing to complete.
4. Save a duplicate copy of this file
(Do not overwrite the original until you are 100% certain the OCR process did not make any significant mistakes. No OCR engine is perfect, so some minor errors are expected).
5. Convert that file to Word, and you should have a document with nicely editable text in place.

Kind regards,