[revsheila]

I use a G-4 Mac running Panther, with MSOffice X and Acrobat Professional (6).
I have several large documents in Acrobat that I would like to export to Word and edit. I can save the Acrobat file as a Word document or as rtf, but when I open it in Word, the text has been saved as an image, not as text.
Anyone know of any way to get a text document from Acrobat to Word in a way that allows editing?

[bofus]

I use Acrobat's text selection tool and select the text (or Command-A) and copy and paste into Word.

[Naphtali]

Since I use an earlier version of Acrobat, and run OS 9.2.2, I'll suggested a quick-and-dirty method that does notdepend on Acrobat.
1. Open your pdf file.
2. Enable text tool.
3. Wipe across-and-down your text string -- and it can be 500 pages long -- to highlight/select it.
4. Copy-paste to Word file. Or drag selected text to Word file.
You may lose some formatiing. But what the hey. You're getting into Word to DO some formatting.

[revsheila]

Thanks. Here is what I'm learning.
The text selection tool works only if the document was created from another text document, such as Word. If the document was created by scanning it in and then putting it into Acrobat, then it is "seen" as an image file, and then the text selection tool is useless.
Unformately for me, most of these documents which I need to edit were scanned in as image files and then made into an Acrobat files.
I was trying to find a simple way to make the conversion. As it is, using Acrobat 6, I am "saving" the douments as tiffs (one tiff per page), then using an ocr reader program to "read" them as text, then transfer to Word. It's tedious and time consuming, and I'm losing all the formatting. Anything in text boxes is being totally messed up. This may only be slightly better than scanning in in myself.
I really do appreciate you taking the time to respond to me. If I figure anything out to shortcut this, I'll definitely post it.

[bofus]

If the "text" is really an image file then you are probably out of luck unless you can find a program that can take a graphic image and convert it to text. for the PC there used to be a program that would do this conversion. Possibly an OCR program can help. You may have to convert the PDF to a tiff file.
Regards,

[Naphtali]

It doesn't look good for the Mudville nine. Have you talked with Adobe?

[professor]

Omnipage X. Works perfectly. Don't download it, get the CD.

[moose_n_squirrel]

Wwwwaiiit a sec...you have Acrobat Professional 6?
What happens if you open one of these scans in Acrobat Professional and go to Document menu, Paper Capture, Start Capture? That is an OCR text conversion feature built into Acrobat for several versions now, surprised nobody brought it up. Should be worth a shot. Then you can try useing Save As and choosing RTF or Text. That might be easier than a lot of copying and pasting.

[saddino]

If you're running Panther, you can use Trapeze to drag and drop convert PDF to formatted RTF for Word. Supports batch converting too. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[Randy_B_Singer]

TextLightning $27 will turn a PDF into a word-processing document for editing:
http://www.metaobjec...m/Products.html

PDF2Office $99 is similar
http://www.recosoft....ffice/index.htm
OmniPage Pro can turn a PDF into a text document and preserve formatting.
PDFtoText (free) (does not retain formatting)
http://q41.de/downloads/pdftotext_en/