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General discussion

How do I have headers and footers appear as regular text?

Mar 13, 2010 3:52AM PST

I'm converting PDF's into Word documents and MS Word 2007 is detecting text on the top and bottom as headers and footers and I must have all text in the document show up as regular text. Please help me, thanks!

Discussion is locked

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Not to presume anything, but
Mar 13, 2010 4:54AM PST

may I ask why you need those headers and footers out into the main body of the document?

If you need to delete them, then I could understand that, but since they are there serving a purpose as headers and/or footers, and provide information about each page, I wonder why they cannot stay.

I'm not sure if there is an easy way to extract text from each pages' header and footer except cut/paste.

Mark

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Re: converting pdf's to Word
Mar 13, 2010 6:20AM PST

One thing missing from your post. That's the program you use to do the conversion. It's not a standard function of Word, so you must be using another program to do the trick.

Kees

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converting pdf's to word
Mar 14, 2010 8:30AM PDT

Sorry for the late response. I'm using Abbyy PDF Transformer 3 to convert PDF's into Word. Then I need to have all of the text to convert into regular text like the body of the document. This is crucial because the program used after conversion doesn't recognize headers and footers. Therefore, is there any way to make all the text as regular text. Thanks!

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Re: pdf to Word
Mar 14, 2010 8:41AM PDT
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pdf to word
Mar 14, 2010 8:54AM PDT

Hi, I know there are many many programs to convert pdf's to word, however, most of those programs just convert with a click of the mouse. However, we must use Abbyy because you are able to specify the read order with manually zoning text, signatures, and tables. But when it comes to the headers and footers, if we would be able to make it as regular text this would speed up production greatly. This is for my job btw Happy

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If this program is the best available for you ...
Mar 14, 2010 9:00AM PDT

it's the best available. That doesn't mean: perfect.
Maybe contact Abby with a change request?

Pdf, in essence, is a printer language. Converting to the original Word version is impossible. Any converting is a best guess.

A workflow based on converting pdf's to Word isn't optimal.

Kees

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pdf's to word
Mar 14, 2010 9:13AM PDT

Well, a lot of work goes into making the Word doc into what the pdf appears like. Abbyy has flaws, but it really shouldn't when the program is explicitly designed to convert into Word. We get missing bullets and dashes, double spacing. The main issue is the headers and footers. We actually have to open the pdf and bring down the headers close to the body of the document and the footers up so when we convert it catches it as regular text. We may just have to use this method. Thanks for your help!

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pdf to word
Mar 14, 2010 9:18AM PDT

I meant specifically designed to convert into MS Office formats, not just Word.

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(NT) Why not use the original Word document?
Mar 14, 2010 6:17PM PDT
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pdf to word
Mar 14, 2010 8:24PM PDT

We are given pdf's to convert over to Word.

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(NT) That's a difficult task, as you noticed.
Mar 14, 2010 8:39PM PDT
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pdf to word
Mar 15, 2010 11:21AM PDT

It is a very difficult task indeed and the abbyy software annoys me and we all want to scrap abbyy, however, we've bought licenses. Abbyy is not consistent at all. Abbyy wants to merge cells together even when they are far apart and it wants to merge table cells with text cells and it's annoying as hell. If we were able to get the headers and footers issue fixed, I wouldn't mind it so much. The thing I hate about MS Word is that when you remove headers/footers, it removes the text with it and we don't want to delete the text. We had in house software developer, however, not anymore.