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I've found myself, again, needing to live in both the land of LaTeX and Microsoft Word. I have Acrobat XI available, so I thought that I would just use it as a middle man in the conversion from LaTeX to Word. It seems like I've had this work in the past, but now it's just producing a lot of gibberish text.

The current workflow:

  • Write LaTeX in TeXworks (from MikTeX)
  • Typeset using the "pdfLaTeX + MakeIndex + BibTex" setting
  • Open the output PDF in Acrobat Pro XI
  • Go File->Save as Other->Microsoft Word->Word Document
  • In settings, uncheck "Include Comments" and "Run OCR if needed"
  • Save

All seems to go fine, then I open the output Word document and all of the text is just random symbols. Interestingly, the formatting appears to be absolutely perfect - lists are lists, links still work, page layout looks fine - just unreadable text. I checked, and Acrobat is able to search the PDF just fine and plain copying the text into word (via clipboard) is perfectly fine. But if I choose "Copy With Formatting" and paste into word, I'm back to the symbols.

I'm suspecting this is just a fonts issue. I'm also assuming this is a fairly generic problem that's not necessarily particular to Acrobat. I'm really hoping to get this sorted out - the output Word Document doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to have the same text and roughly the same formatting. Any thoughts on possible settings to change in MikTeX that might yield a PDF Acrobat will have an easier time with?

Thanks!

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  • Interesting - I added \RequirePackage{mmap} to the template and it's significantly improved. I'm not sure what exactly that does yet (I'll have to look into it), but I found it on tex.stackexchange.com/questions/115080/…. There still are some broken characters though like the double dash becomes an "X", the 'f' becomes a fancy '+' sign, the #2 seems to have a crazy bulge on it, and some apostrophe's have become stars. More thoughts would be useful! Jul 25, 2014 at 1:35

3 Answers 3

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I solved this issue by using in the latex document

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}

The first statement enables T1 font encoding and the second enables the use of modern latex fonts.

I even had been using (only) the first statement the whole time (which did not fix this issue by itself) but adding the second statement did fix it and the Word document saved from Acrobat Pro (X in my case) was displayed correctly.

See the answers at this https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/115080/cannot-copy-text-from-the-simplest-pdf-file?rq=1 question for more details.

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  1. Use these packages in LateX file which might help to create a better text copyable PDF file.

    • \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
    • \usepackage{lmodern}
  2. Generate the PDF file

  3. Open the PDF file with Microsoft Word 2013 or higher

  4. It will convert all of your texts, figures, tables. But I had some trouble with the footnote, book name, author name sections on the top/bottom of the page.

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Currently, it's better to use Mathpix to convert LaTeX Generated PDF to Word with the best accuracy. If someone knows a better option, I would be happy to test it.

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