Removing white background from Acrobat Reader scans imported to Word?

  • Thread starter Thread starter John K via OfficeKB.com
  • Start date Start date
J

John K via OfficeKB.com

Hello,

I have used a number of programs to turn scanned PDFs (i.e. scanned documents
presented in PDF format) into Word documents. Common to all of the programs
is that they sometimes use/generate a white background for certain parts of
the text. Getting rid of this is not a simple question of selecting "No fill"
(Format/Background/No fill or the analogous process for tables). It is
possible to get rid of the background but it takes "forever" in complex
tables. Anybody know any quick solutions?

Many thanks,
K
 
This is not a Word issue. PDF files are not intended to be easily converted
to text and the OCR type of software intended to convert graphics to text
are all a bit hit and miss. One solution is to output from the application
using plain text. You'll have to format it in Word, but plain text cannot
carry backgrounds.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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Hi Graham,

Thanks for reply. I realise it's not a Word issue. There are many conversion
programs that now do a good job of recreating PDFs. Probably like you, I
prefer to simply extract the text and go from there. OCR based recreation of
scans/images can be hit and miss but, in my case, it often beats the
alternative of recreating everything from scratch. This is particularly true
of complex tables with varying column widths etc. over twenty or so pages. In
my case, recreated documents are then translated. There is double
significance in being able to work from a digital copy and present a good
facsimile of same to the client. Playing with the problem yesterday, I found
a long-winded way around the problem and just wondered if anyone knew of a
quicker answer or macro.

Many thanks,
K


Graham said:
This is not a Word issue. PDF files are not intended to be easily converted
to text and the OCR type of software intended to convert graphics to text
are all a bit hit and miss. One solution is to output from the application
using plain text. You'll have to format it in Word, but plain text cannot
carry backgrounds.
Hello,
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Many thanks,
K
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