I have a PDF document with my resume which I need to edit. I used this service to convert it to doc. I opened it in Word 2010 and saved it as .docx. There are some bizzare problems where there's empty space and if you try to delete it text gets shifted into vertical columns. How can I fix this? I'm afraid this document has a lot of private information and I can't just fill in dummy text, then the formatting gets even more messed up :/ Otherwise I'd post screen shots.
Word document has very strange “hidden” formating after converting from PDF to .docx
microsoft wordmicrosoft-word-2010
Related Solutions
I too had this problem with a large document - Word 2013 was sluggish and not displaying pictures in web layout. The document was about 8 MB and 900 pages.
After some investigation I concluded this is a deficiency in Word's rendering of web layout.
For the record:
- Various of ways of 'tidying up' the document had no effect (saving to rtf format and opening the rtf file; opening and saving in LibreOffice as docx and opening the docx file; repeating but using odt format; copying without the final pargraph mark; etc)
- LibreOffice, although sluggish, was able to render the document in web layout
- Using the old doc format allowed Word to render OK
- Images display correctly near the start of the document
- Splitting the document into subdocuments and a master shows the same problem
The clincher for me was discovering that the same picture inserted at successive locations rendered squashed up and then not at all. Here's a screenshot from the place in the document where things go wrong.
So there is a point in the document beyond which images do not render, as though a limit has been reached and an attempt is made to render the image by squashing it vertically. The limit varies with the pane size for displaying the document e.g. if the navigation pane is displayed the limit on image displaying is moved up the document.
This is a bug in Word's image rendering in Web Layout of the later file format.
In my case, since I wanted to use Word rather than switch to LibreOffice, and use docx rather than doc format, I split the document into several separate smaller documents; these display images OK although are a little inconvenient.
I have finally found the solution! You must go into page setup in Word, and create a custom paper size (I used the same size specs as A4, and set printable area to 0 in all 4 cases). The trick then is to make sure you apply this to each page of the document individually, specifying whether the given page is portrait or landscape orientation. Then the converted PDF should give you 100% printable area and still maintain the formatting of both portrait and landscape in the document!
Best Answer
You might have luck copying and pasting chunks of content one at a time to a new document. Even if this doesn't work you may find the root cause of whats causing the strange formatting.