The PDF Blog

While some of you may be regular or occasional users of our free PDF to Word conversion service, in this post I’d like to concentrate on the extended PDF to Word technology in our Nitro PDF Professional product.

Our desktop product has the obvious speed benefit over the online service, but much more than that is its powerful settings for fully controlling the output of the Microsoft Word (DOC) or Rich Text (RTF) files you create from your PDF documents. While our free service does a nice job of handling PDF to Word conversion in general, what you may have come to realize is that it’s only best suited for some documents – Nitro Pro is quite different.

Nitro Pro is designed to give you far greater control over how PDF files are converted to Word, enabling you to produce Word files that best suit what you need to do with the file. The advanced controls enable you to answer key questions like:

• Do I need to make major layout and formatting changes to the Word file?
• Do I need the output to very closely resemble the source PDF file’s appearance?
• Do I need to find a middle ground between an accurate appearance and being highly editable?

All the controls in Nitro Pro are available from the preferences. Just head to Nitro PDF Button (aka File menu) > Preferences > Conversion > Word & Rich Text.

Page layout modes

The page layout conversion modes provide you with options to choose the right balance between the output file’s editability as well as its visual accuracy when compared to the original PDF. The best choice comes down to what you intend to do to the Microsoft Word (or rich text) files you create.

• Highly editable (with layout). This option produces a file that is quite editable, while still retaining the look-and-feel of the original PDF.  Text formatting, graphics, and paragraphs are all recovered, and the output file is laid out in columns to maintain visual accuracy. We set this as the default PDF-to-Word conversion mode in Nitro Pro as it is likely to be the best mode for most people.
• Highly editable (single column). This option produces a file that is ideal for making major structural or layout changes to the document.  Text formatting, graphics and paragraphs are all recovered, but no columns are used in laying out the content.
• Precisely laid out. This option produces a file that accurately reproduces the look of the PDF, and uses text boxes to precisely layout all the content. When producing a Word/DOC/RTF file that must closely resemble the PDF, then this is the mode to use. Of course, because it uses text boxes and focuses on the precise layout of page content, the output will not be as easy to edit.
• Use custom character spacing to retain original layout. This adjusts the spacing between characters in order to closely reproduce the PDF text appearance. This results in exactly the same text appearing on each line, while also maintain full text wrapping across lines for easy editing — it’s a very neat little feature and can be particularly useful in the Highly editable (with layout) and Precisely laid out modes.

Images in PDF files

Image options allow you to set how images will be handled during the conversion process.

• Automatic Anchoring. Nitro Pro  automatically determines the best method for anchoring images, based on the type of content found in the PDF.
• Anchor to Paragraph. Each image is anchored to the nearest paragraph, making content easier to edit since the image will move with the paragraph as the surrounding content is edited. This works well with the Highly editable (with layout) layout mode.
• Anchor to Page. Each image is anchored to a fixed location within the exported page, to precisely match the location of the image within the PDF page. This works well with the Precisely laid out mode.
• Convert in-line images only. Only images placed between words and on the same baseline as line of text are converted — other images are excluded. This works well with the Highly editable (single column) page layout mode when you’re planning to do major editing work.

Tables in PDF files

Nitro Pro allows you to determine whether or not tabular content is converted to tables in your output files.

• Detect Tables. If set, Nitro Pro will automatically detect content that is organized into tables within the PDF and attempt to convert it to tables in the exported file. This is most appropriate for the Highly editable (single column) and Highly editable (with layout).

Headers and footers in PDF files

Using these options, you can specify how Nitro Pro handles content that appears to be header or footer information. This feature becomes extremely useful when you’re wanting to do major re-editing of content.

• Detect and convert back to headers and footers. Nitro Pro will automatically detect headers and footers, and will convert these into headers or footers in the exported file.
• Detect and delete headers and footers. Content that appears to be header or footer information will not be included in the exported file. This one is particular useful for when you’re using the Highly editable (single column) mode and want to repurpose the cotent significantly.
• Don’t detect headers and footers. Header and footer information will be converted as normal content, and will be placed in the body of the exported document’s contents, near the top/bottom of the page. This would arguably best suit Precisely laid out mode conversions.

Dealing with problem text

PDF files can contain any number of different font faces, including ones that use non-standard encoding. The result when converting to Microsoft Word can be garbled text. Nitro Pro includes advanced controls for correctly extracting and exporting this problem text so it’s reusable in Word. It’s important to note that you must install the Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) component that is part of the Microsoft Office installer before using our Nitro Pro’s advanced text recovery. Once you’ve done that, here are the recovery options available to you:

• All text. If set, Nitro Pro will apply an advanced optical recovery technique to all text within the document, and all text will use the same font style in the output. This is most appropriate when you’re planning to do major reformatting after converting with a mode like Highly editable (single column).
• Just problem text. If set, Nitro Pro will apply advanced optical text recovery only to problem text within the document, retaining the original font appearance wherever possible.
• Don’t fix problem text. If set, problem text will not be repaired.