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How to Fix Garbled Text When Converting Scanned PDFs
Question details
The user is experiencing garbled or unreadable text after attempting to convert a scanned PDF document into another format.
- Product
- Device & OS
- not provided
- Scenario
- Converting a scanned PDF document into an editable format like Word using standard PDF conversion or OCR tools.
- Observed behavior
- The resulting text in the converted document appears garbled, incorrect, or completely unreadable, often due to poor scan quality or non-standard source files.
Ensure your scanner's glass bed is completely clean to avoid smudges, and verify that the original physical document has clear, high-contrast text before attempting a new scan.
Improve Scan Quality and Rescan the Document
Optimizing scanner settings and using standard PDF output formats ensures that text recognition tools can properly process the document.
Garbled text during conversion usually happens when the source PDF was created by non-standard third-party scanning software, or when smudges and low resolution affect the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine's ability to read the characters.
Use a microfiber cloth to thoroughly clean the scanner glass, removing any dust, smudges, or marks that could obscure the text.
Open your scanning software's preferences and set the scanning resolution to at least 300 DPI (Dots Per Inch) to ensure the text is crisp and recognizable.
In the scanner software's save or export settings, ensure you choose a standards-compliant PDF format rather than a proprietary or heavily compressed image format.
Open the newly scanned, high-quality PDF in your PDF converter or OCR tool, and process the file to get clean, readable text.
Convert Scanned PDFs Accurately with WPS Office
WPS Office features advanced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to accurately extract text from scanned PDFs, minimizing the risk of garbled text while maintaining original document formatting perfectly.
- 1. Open the PDF in WPS Office: Launch WPS Office and open your scanned PDF document.
- 2. Access the OCR Tool: Navigate to the 'Tools' tab on the top ribbon and select the 'OCR' or 'PDF to Word' feature.
- 3. Select Document Language: Choose the correct language of the document's text in the OCR settings to guarantee the highest text recognition accuracy.
- 4. Start Conversion: Click 'Start' or 'Convert' to process the scanned document and save it as a clean, editable text or Word file.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does my PDF text look like random symbols after conversion?
This typically occurs when the original document was scanned as an image lacking text encoding, or if the source software used non-standard font mapping. An OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool is required to correctly interpret the visual shapes into readable digital text.
What is the best DPI setting for scanning documents to ensure clean conversions?
For most text documents, a scanning resolution of 300 DPI is highly recommended. Lower resolutions can make the text blurry and prone to OCR errors, while significantly higher resolutions unnecessarily increase the file size without improving text recognition.
Can I fix a PDF file that is already garbled without rescanning?
If the text in the original digital PDF is permanently corrupted due to missing font encodings, you may not be able to fix it directly. However, if it's a scanned image PDF, you can run a high-quality OCR tool like the one in WPS Office to re-process the image and extract the text accurately.
