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/t5/acrobat-discussions/converting-a-pdf-to-ms-word-font-spacing-issue/td-p/11134482 May 15, 2020 May 15, 2020
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I have and old manually typed document that I scaned to PDF. The PDF document reads well. I then converted the PDF to Word file from Acrobat DC, In some instancies the Word file had a text compression (letters and spaces mashed together) I tried changing fonts, paragraph and line spacing and could not correct.. When I pasted the compressed line in this text box the compression went away. So I made a jpeg with a screen capture.
Edit and convert PDFs , General troubleshooting , Scan documents and OCR Community guidelinesBe kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
9 Replies 9 Community Expert ,/t5/acrobat-discussions/converting-a-pdf-to-ms-word-font-spacing-issue/m-p/11134578#M256846 May 15, 2020 May 15, 2020
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First off, I can't help you. However, I can join in your grief in that I also had a typed document that after scanning and OCR-ing also had dreadful results. Parts were so bad it was eaiser to retype them than to repair the text.
Other than to rasis my hand and say "Me Too," was curious as to what typewriter did the original? The original that I was dealing with used the Courier font. Was yours a Selectric where you could change the font ball?
Anyhow, good luck to all. I find it interesting that when processing text in a document, manual typing text seems to work less well than other kinds of text on paper. Curious.
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Adobe Employee ,/t5/acrobat-discussions/converting-a-pdf-to-ms-word-font-spacing-issue/m-p/11146494#M257754 May 20, 2020 May 20, 2020
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Thank you for reporting the issue. Have you started facing this issue recently?
Can you please tell us if it is specific to some font or a file? If possible, can you please share the input and output files with us so that we can take a look into the issue and provide you the better experience with our services.
Thanks and Regards,
Software Engineer II
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Community Expert ,/t5/acrobat-discussions/converting-a-pdf-to-ms-word-font-spacing-issue/m-p/11146976#M257799 May 20, 2020 May 20, 2020
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We had a similar example about a year ago.
Found that the text (or portions of the text) had kerning/tracking applied, and it probably was introduced by Acrobat's OCR utility, attempting to mimic/represent the visual appearance of the original scanned text.
Adobe , please check your utility: it should not be adding tracking/kerning/letterspacing to any text during the OCR process.
We corrected the resulting Word file by removing all manual overrides at the character level. Two ways to do that in Word/Windows (Mac-ers, only the second method is available in Word/Mac):
- Open Word's Navigator panel.
- Select the text (we recommend selecting ALL the text with Control + A).
- Click the bottom-most pink eraser to erase manual overrides (formatting).
- The text should snap and appear normal.
- Select the text.
- Open Word's Font Panel (see screen capture below).
- Select the Advanced tab at the top.
- Set the Spacing to Normal and leave the "By" field blank.
- The text should snap and appear normal.
Correct bad text kerning/tracking in Word.
Hope this helps.
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