It’s August. It’s summer. And it’s sunny outside. Not too hot, not too chilly A really nice day and way too easy to get distracted by just looking out the window.

And amidst the lazy summer days of popsicles and vacations, the (work) beat goes on. Stretch out the sluggishness and take a deep breath. . . .We’re at it too, fielding questions and troubleshooting tech queries—armed with a coke slushee in one hand and a mouse in the other. So bring it on. . . .

We received a tech question recently (from a client who “brought it”) that’ll serve as a good tip to keep in mind when converting your PDFs.

A client was trying to convert a PDF into another format and claimed that the PDF didn’t convert properly at all. The PDF, when opened in our software, displayed gibberish/garbage text, “even though it opened and looked fine on Acrobat”.

The issue here was that the native PDF contained some damaged fonts, in which case Acrobat Reader just draws the letters, but doesn’t recognize them.

If you’ve encountered this problem-- or ever do in the future, you can check to see if the fonts are damaged or not by selecting a part of the PDF in question and copying it by using the Copy command under the Edit menu of the Adobe Reader (first, ensure that you are in Select mode: Tools> Basic> Select Text).

Then open MS Word or Notepad and paste the pattern. If the fonts are undamaged, the should turn out readable. Our software will recognize this and therefore doesn’t show damaged fonts properly in the viewer even though Adobe can.

If, however, our software viewer does display the fonts correctly in the software viewer (even when the fonts are clearly damaged in the original PDF), then the user can use the Professional versions of our software to enable the OCR engine to generate the conversion, treating the native/original PDF document as an image file.

So you can still get your conversion done with such PDFs, although you’ll get it through a different approach. For future cases, if a conversion doesn’t come out right, first check that the PDFs you’re converting are properly made as successful conversions rely on the original PDF itself (its security, fonts, scan quality, etc.).

It’ll go a long way to save you the extra frustration in trying out different methods to get the conversion done. More importantly, it’ll help you get your work done quicker so you can enjoy the rest of the day.

(*slurp, sluurp*, *click*. . . )

Have fun!