Convert PDF→Excel: extra spaces in words randomly

[Nate Schley]

I had 3 PDF (v1.7) files with tables I converted to Excel.  I started by deleted extraneous pages, then deleting extraneous content on the remaining pages so that the only content was the tables of interest.  Generally, the conversion process worked like a charm.

The problem is so many of the words have extraneous spaces in them, and I have to manually re-group the words.

Examples of words I need to manually correct:  "b rake", "br ake", "bra ke", "un it", "ou t", "ope n", "supp ress"

I saw one thread in the community citing this issue.  The response referred to OCR settings in the user guide.  The Nitro Pro settings were already set as advised. I noticed OCR→Recognition→Qualty = medium, so I changed it to High & re-converted.   There was no appreciable difference in the conversion output.

Here are relevent app settings:

• Conversion
  • Advanced recovery
    • All text
    • language = english
    • automatically OCR image-based docs
• OCR
  • correct image skew - checked (I have no graphics beyond table lines)
  • Fixed threshold - unchecked
  • detect text orientation - unchecked (all text is horizontal, L-R)
  • Recognition
    • language = english
    • quality = high
  • Output
    • use system font based recognition - unchecked (all fonts seem to be embedded in the PDF)

I'm using Nitro Pro 13.16.2.300