PDF to Word: text ends up as a picture with an anchor symbol

[swhill]

Lately when I attempt to convert a pdf to a word doc, the work doc created has an anchor symbol in the upper left corner and I am unable to edit the verbiage. Its as if I copied a image into a word doc. Help is appreciated.

[Stefan Ziegler]

I think you have to go into edit mode in word and then this should go away..

[swhill]

Thank you. Yes, I considered that but edit mode did not solve the issue. I can move the verbiage around in a block just as if I had imported an image into a word doc. I tried to convert in Blocks, Flow and Fixed modes. This result does not occur on every PDF to Word conversion I perform. I suspect the PDFs that are not converting have a setting designed to prevent conversion. I tried the Unlock function in PDF24 before attempting to convert the file, but that also did not work.

[PDF24 Support]

Hello,

PDF to Word has been reworked since this post (in PDF24 Creator since version 11.31.0, and online). In the PDF24 Toolbox, tool "Convert PDF to ..." with the format "Word (.docx)", the setting "Mode" decides how the text is placed:

• Auto (default): simple text pages become flowing text, pages with a lot of graphics become text frames at their original position.
• Fixed: all pages as text frames at their original position, closest to the look of the PDF. Word can show an anchor symbol at such frames, but the text in them can be edited.
• Flow: all pages as flowing paragraphs without text frames, the easiest to edit.

If a page contains no real text, for example a scanned page, it always becomes a picture in Word. In this case run OCR on the PDF first (tool "PDF OCR") and then convert it.

Both also work online: https://tools.pdf24.org/en/pdf-to-word and https://tools.pdf24.org/en/ocr-pdf

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