We recommend switching the Show / Hide button at Home > Paragraph to ON, to see how the converted document layout is expressed. If you do not see this button, you may need to customize your ribbon.
When starting from the File Open dialog box with the XPS/PDF file type, the Word documents cannot be named beforehand; they are displayed in Word with their original (PDF or XPS) names. You can edit these files without saving them first; however it is a good idea to save them with the Save As command, before large-scale editing. The source file remains locked to other users until the converted file is saved.
Do not click Save. This will cause the newly generated file to overwrite the original file. Always use Save As.
Do not click Close without saving a converted document. This will cause the newly generated file to be lost. In Word’s interpretation nothing has happened with the document and there seems to be no information to be lost. This way you can lose the result of a conversion that may have taken a long time to complete.
Do not click Close after modifying the file and then accept the offer to save the file to Word format. This will cause the newly generated file to overwrite the original file.
In all other cases, the Word document name is defined before converting, so you can edit and re-save the file freely.
PDF Convert is designed to replicate the original pages as closely as possible, keeping columns, titles, pictures and framed elements as they were. The program offers two ways of having this done: Flowing Columns and True Page. The latter places all page elements in text boxes or frames. The former removes boxes when possible, and uses column and paragraph breaks and margin settings to format the page.
If the converted page looks different, it may need only a small amount of editing to restore it to the original layout, for instance, by removing or adding column or paragraph breaks. Go to File > Options > Display to show and hide breaks, tabs and spaces.
We recommend switching the Show / Hide button at Home > Paragraph to ON, to see how the converted document layout is expressed. If you do not see this button, you may need to customize your ribbon.
Columns
To remove columns
If you do not need the columns generated by the converter, select One at Page Layout > Page Setup > Columns.
To remove column breaks
The converter places column breaks at the end of the original columns to keep the original layout.
To display the Column Break sign in Print Layout view, select File > Options > Display > Show all formatting marks.
In some cases columnar text may not fit well in the available space of the resulting layout. In such cases, the column breaks at the end of the original columns may flow into the following column, forcing the content of the next original column into the third column. Removing the column break can solve the problem easily.
The same action is required if you add a significant amount of text to the original.
To add column breaks
To specify exactly where the next column should begin, go to Page Layout > Page Setup > Breaks and select Column.
Frames and Text boxes
Graphics are put either in text boxes or frames. See the topic 'The difference between a text box and a frame' in the Microsoft Word Help. If the end of a paragraph is not visible scroll down in the text box to see it. Re-size the text box or select the text and reduce its point size until all the text is visible.
Tables
Source files usually do not store tables as tables but just as a set of text strings originated from cells. The program reconstructs the tables. This works more reliably with gridded tables (tables with cell separator lines), but it can also convert non-gridded tables.
Fonts
PDF Convert does not extract fonts embedded in the PDF/XPS. It interprets the sizes, shapes, weights and font types detected in the PDF/XPS, and uses the closest match it can find from the fonts installed on your system. A wide range of installed fonts will make font rendering more successful.