Improving Conversion Results

If the formatting of the original PDF document has not been preserved:

1. Check which mode is selected in the Retain layout field.

   When converting to DOC, RTF, or HTML, select:

   • Original layout to preserve the layout of the original document. The output document will look exactly like the original.
   • Text flow if the original layout need not be saved. The output document will preserve the original paragraphs and fonts, but will not preserve columns, the positioning of the objects, and spacing.
   • Keep pictures to preserve the pictures. If the source PDF file has many pictures, the size of the output file may be fairly large. Clear the Keep pictures option to reduce file size.

   When converting to XLS, select:

   • Ignore text outside tables to preserve only the tables. Any text outside the tables will be discarded.
   • Transform numeric values to numbers to convert the numeric values contained in the PDF file into Microsoft Excel numbers, allowing you to perform arithmetic operations on numeric cells.

   When converting to TXT, select:

   • Insert page break character (#12) as page separator to break the converted text into pages in exactly the same way as the original text. If this option is not selected, the original page breaks will be lost.
   • Insert blank line as paragraph separator to separate paragraphs with blank lines.

2. Adjust the areas detected by the program or manually select text, table, and picture areas as required. For detailed instructions, see Selecting and Adjusting Areas Manually.

3. Check text orientation in the text areas. For detailed instructions, see Selecting and Adjusting Areas Manually.

If there are too many errors in the output file:

1. Check the languages selected in the PDF document languages field.
   To select the required language(s), click Change…
   If a required language is not on the list, this means that ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0 does not support this language. See Supported Conversion Languages for the full list of available languages.

   Tip. If a PDF document is written in more than three languages, try converting it fragment by fragment. First select only text areas written in one language and specify their language and the appropriate page range (see Selecting and Adjusting Areas Manually for details). Next select and convert the text areas written in another language, etc.

2. In the Processing mode field, select Process PDF as image.
   ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0 extracts textual data from a PDF document and uses these data to support the conversion process.
   If a PDF document contains special characters or non-standard fonts, the corresponding text fragments may be displayed incorrectly in the output document (e.g. some letters may be replaced with "?" or "□").
   To improve conversion quality, try selecting the Process PDF as image option and converting the PDF document anew.
   In this case, ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0 will use an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, which can handle any type of PDF file (including image-only PDF files), employing any types of font. ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0 will analyze the page as if it were a snapshot of a document and use its OCR capabilities to recognize the text.

Detecting Areas to Convert

Selecting and Adjusting Areas Manually