PDF Problem Solving

1. CONVERTING NON-SCANNED PDFs to Word:

2. CONVERTING SCANNED PDFs to Word:

3. CLEANING UP/EDITING converted PDFS:

4. EDITING PDFs directly:

5. OTHER recommendations

LinkedIn is about networking and adding value. As Monday morning dawns here in Kobe, let me follow on from the tourism last week and try and give you all some more.

Note: No commission here, these are all personal recommendations.

Many of you reading are translators who have to work with a range of formats. Hand on heart, most of us would probably like everything in MS Word.

BUT - oftentimes, clients have PDF forms that need translating. Some translators would refuse them and the job. Especially if they are scanned and messy.

For those who don't (myself included) here are a few tips I found:

1. CONVERTING NON-SCANNED PDFs to Word:

WPS: https://www.wps.com/pdf-to-word/

In my experience, the best package has been WPS PDF converter. It does admirably a lot of the time and although the free package limits you to 5 pages, I'd gently suggest $30 to buy it is probably going to pay for itself with the first job. Equally good is SMALLPDF.

A few other choices below:

https://www.techradar.com/best/free-pdf-to-word

Worth a mention - SmallPDF: https://smallpdf.com/ (beautifully easy interface)

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2. CONVERTING SCANNED PDFs to Word:

All-rounder:

Abby FineReader 15

https://www.abbyy.com/en-eu/finereader/

My go-to product, it has been a lifesaver on many occasions. I still think that it's the best OCR program in terms of user-friendliness and overall performance.

OR, for Japanese in particular:

'Yomotori Kakumei' (Reading Revolution)

https://www.panasonic.com/jp/company/pstc/products/yomikaku.html

Obviously the download, interface and program are all in Japanese but if you're translating and working with Japanese, that should be no problem.

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3. CLEANING UP/EDITING converted PDFS:

Once you get the meat of the PDF content into your familiar and cosy MS Word interface, you probably still have a fair bit of nipping and tucking to do to get the look and feel consistent and client ready.

This applies all the more so when converting scanned PDFs.

Here, this product is likely to help:

- Incorrect formatting

- Tag soup when processing the Word file in translation software

- Text boxes or frames hiding text and generally being a royal hassle

etc. etc.

https://www.translatortools.net/docs/transtools/doccleaner

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4. EDITING PDFs directly:

So you have a pin-sharp PDF which you can't edit in Word but you would like to translate, preserving the look and feel exactly. Here's another option:

https://www.iceni.com/infix.htm

This will let you edit and overwrite PDFs in almost all cases in an MS Word-like interface and although the clicking and boxes can be a little fiddly, provided you don't have 100 pages to process and want to keep the end product looking like the original as far as possible, it could well be a good option.

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5. OTHER recommendations

Alternative fuss-free PDF viewer:

https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html

Another program to clean tags from converted PDF files:

https://www.asap-traduction.com/CodeZapper

Merging PDFs and other files easily and instantly online:

https://www.mergefil.es/

I hope you found some of this useful. Connections and feedback all extremely welcome. Stay healthy and happy all.