PDF Documents

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  • PDF Documents

    Anyone know of the best way to transfer a PDF file to a word document? Not sure if there's a simple fix or software that needs to be purchased.

    Thanks.

  • #2
    Re: PDF Documents

    Is this regular prose or a script? In either case, one can generally just hightlight all the text you want and cut & paste it into Word. You can even do a quick test with Word and paste it in directly from the PDF to see how it transfers. You might not have any issues at all.

    Normally, I like to "clean up" the text and get rid of any formatting that might throw things off. Thus I cut & paste it into a text editor (Notepad) and then re-copy and paste it from there into Word. There will be probably some formatting issues -- usually with paragraph breaks -- but that should do the trick.

    Now, if it is a scanned file, then that will be a bit more problematic. You might have to get an PDF program that can OCR - optical character recognition. Something like Adobe Acrobat Pro. That is seems to rarely be perfect and it will almost always take some cleaning up, but that works too. Hopefully you have the former.
    Will
    Done Deal Pro
    www.donedealpro.com

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    • #3
      Re: PDF Documents

      John August's app Highland specializes in melting pdfs into scripts in fountain or fdx formats. I think it's only mac.

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      • #4
        Re: PDF Documents

        Have you tried just opening the PDF in a recent version of Word?

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        • #5
          Re: PDF Documents

          Originally posted by Mitchell McLean View Post
          Have you tried just opening the PDF in a recent version of Word?
          I had never even tried that myself*, but just did and voila. Ya learn something new everyday.

          *I should note this is with Word 2016, which I just got a couple of months ago.
          Will
          Done Deal Pro
          www.donedealpro.com

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          • #6
            Re: PDF Documents

            Thanks for the replies.

            Mitchell, that's the equivalent of unplugging and plugging it back in again...works like a charm.

            Thanks.

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            • #7
              Re: PDF Documents

              Benny, you should be aware that a PDF may or may not convert well to text/Word, no matter what program you are using to convert it. I have been dealing with this issue for many years. The file may convert from PDF perfectly, or it may have a few strange rearrangements of text, or it may be a complete jumble of incomprehensible text.

              How can this be?

              The essential issue is that PDF files can be created with a great number of PDF drivers. These different drivers do not produce exactly the same PDF. The PDF will open fine in any PDF viewer, but a converter that tries to convert the PDF back to text has to interpret the particular PDF that a particular driver has created.

              I do not have a recent version of Word, so I have not tested Word against a battery of PDF files created with different drivers. However, my experience with PDF files leads me to think that you will eventually open a PDF with it and get a result that makes your eyes pop out.

              "The fact that you have seen professionals write poorly is no reason for you to imitate them." - ComicBent.

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