[Phil van Kleur]

Thanks a lot Stefan, I've just done so.

I'm taking this seriously because it's for a student with bad eyesight. They find it difficult to read PDFs, and prefer to convert them to Word. They can then highlight text, increase font size, copy sentences to their notes files, and generally use Word's editing features to make life easier. This is why I'm comparing different PDF-to-Word converters. Although Adobe Acrobat and Kofax Power PDF will convert the text, they mangle the diagrams: in this file, those include bar charts, maps, and thread layouts in Roman textiles. That's not acceptable in an academic paper. On my other, smaller, files, PDF24 seemed to do better. But as you now know, I can't make it work on this one.

[Phil van Kleur]

I don't understand why PDF24 has trouble with this, but the other converters don't. I wanted to use PDF24 because it sometimes does less damage to diagrams. But with this happening, I'm stuck.

[Phil van Kleur]

When I put my mouse over the Word file, at the cursor is a cross made of four arrows. If I click on the mouse and try to select text, it moves the entire page as an image. If I do Control-A to select the entire file, Word freezes. So there doesn't seem to be a way to select the text. Could you try converting the file I uploaded, and see whether you can do so?

[Phil van Kleur]

This is similar to my question at https://help.pdf24.org/en/questions/question/why-does-ocring-and-converting-to-docx-leave-the-docx-file-as-images/ , except that there, the PDF being converted was images of text. Here, it's text, as shown by my being able to copy from it. As PDF24 gave me images in both cases, I wonder whether it is designed to do that if it can't work out how to convert the PDF to Word text?

[Phil van Kleur]

It looks as though this problem isn't only with papers that start off as images. I've asked a new question at https://help.pdf24.org/en/questions/question/why-does-converting-a-text-pdf-to-word-leave-it-as-images/ . Here, I tried converting an academic paper downloaded from Academia.edu . It doesn't look scanned, and is searchable. I can copy text from it and paste that into Notepad. Yet, when I convert it to Word, the result is images. I demonstrated with a screenshot in the new question, and put up a temporary copy of the paper at http://www.filedropper.com/ddwild2002thetextileindustriesofromanbritain . Is it possible that I've accidentally turned on a switch that says "Convert all PDFs to images?".

[Phil van Kleur]

This is Phil van Kleur, who wrote the question above. I spent over half an hour preparing screenshots to include in the question, only to find when I'd uploaded them all that the system refused to accept the question. It kept saying "There is an error in your image", but would not explain what. By trial and error, I found I had to remove all the images before I could submit. I was expecting I could then go back and remove the text referring to them, but I can't find a control for editing submitted questions. Unlike StackExchange, don't you allow that, or am I missing something?

Anyway, I would really appreciate it if the site would explain why it won't accept my images, instead of just saying there's an error. I prepared them carefully to show exactly what each file looked like, and what were the settings I used.

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