[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I won't reply to all of this but will expand my original comment a little
based on your additional information about how these PDFs have been
acquired. I suspect the PDF probably did come from some sort of MFD
(multifunction device). My brother frequently sends me crooked, ugly (but
readable) PDFs created on such a machine, which offers the option of
scanning a document as if to fax it but then sending it to the computer as a
PDF instead. What you get is of just about the same usefulness as a paper
fax when it comes to working with it in Word.

My flatbed scanner (not an MFD) offers various document scanning options.
First one selects "Text & Graphic(s) as Image," "Text as Image," "Editable
Text," or "Editable Text with Graphic(s)." I haven't explored all these
options since I use the scanner primarily for image scanning (which is the
Scan Picture rather than Scan Document option and has entirely different
settings). After choosing one of those settings, you can choose the output
(the choice can include email, fax, printer, Clipboard, etc.), but if you
choose "Save to file," you aren't given any indication what sort of file
you're saving to until you're done; then the choices are PDF, TEXT, HTML,
and Rich Text.

If I choose "Editable Text" and save as a PDF, the document is saved in PDF
format with *selectable* text, but if you actually select it and copy/paste
into another document, the result is risible. It turns out that sending the
document directly to WordPad results in a much more usable result.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

"Prof. JR" wrote in message
...
Hi Ms. Barnhill,

Thank you for your comment. I've posted two more general comments below,
as
response to Mr. Mayor. I suspect you are correct and that nothing can be
done with these files to make them into text that can be edited.

I recognized your name from a conversation thread last spring about notes
and bibliographies, a basic function in Word that proves useless to me as
a
scholar, by the way, for all the reasons mentioned in the thread.

Somewhere you had mentioned Dick McBrien and teaching Latin, which caught
my
eye since a good friend of mine was McBrien's TA at Notre Dame and I've
taught Latin (among other things) at the graduate level.

Your comment about finding Word more intuitive than WordPerfect also
caught
my eye since I, and so many of my colleagues, curiously find just the
opposite. Almost all of us use WordPerfect, some switching from Word to
Word
Perfect, as do most of the administrative assistants, because of the
simplicity of commands, transparency of codes entered, with the ability to
see them and adjust them, and the lack of pre-formatted settings that you
don't want and need to be turned off. This last matter is a particular
problem when editing together large documents, with chapters done by
various
people or committees, that have many different embedded settings. (There
is a
conversation begun on 8/15 on headers and page numbers, and another one on
8/16 concerning default settings for footnotes/endnotes, in which I
blathered
a bit to Mr. Buckland and Mr. Mayor about the opaqueness of Word.)

Since the ability to use global commands and adapt specific templates,
both
of which Mr. Buckland and Mr. Mayor find to be advantages in Word, provide
little benefit to academics, but are good for the general marketplace,
perhaps cuique suum. Different software programs for differing needs.

Thank you for your time, which I appreciate.

John


"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:

Many PDFs are created by scanning as pictures. The only way to convert
them
to editable text is to use OCR software.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

"Prof. JR" wrote in message
...
Texts have arrived that were scanned into pdf format. My
administrative
assistant, whose computer has Adobe Acrobat, converted the files to rtf
for
me. When I opened the files in Word 2007 they could be read, but the
files
were treated as pictures not text, and I was unable to edit and process
them
as text.

Is there a way to open these files in Word 2007 so that they can be
edited
as text documents?

Thank you for any help that you can give.