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Word counts in pdf
Thread poster: Louise Souter (X)
Louise Souter (X)
Louise Souter (X)  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:20
Spanish to English
+ ...
Apr 8, 2010

I know this has already been discussed at

http://www.proz.com/forum/translator_resources/1829-word_count_for_pdfs.html

but the pdf my client sent me converts to word as an image. Could anyone suggest anything else I could try?

Thank you
 
Alexandre Maricato
Alexandre Maricato
Brazil
Local time: 09:20
English to Portuguese
Try OCR Apr 8, 2010

Try using a OCR software. Maybe you will have to print and scan the document, but it may work.
 
Claire Cox
Claire Cox
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:20
French to English
+ ...
Abbyy Apr 8, 2010

Abbyy pdf converter will convert even a scanned pdf file into a Word document and you can then count the words as normal. I've found it worth every penny even though it isn't always brilliant with complicated layouts or tables. I'm sure other pdf conversion software packages will do the same thing. I think you can usually download them for a trial period to see what you think, so you could at least try that to get your word count and then decide whether you want to invest later.
 
Noni Gilbert Riley
Noni Gilbert Riley
Spain
Local time: 14:20
Spanish to English
+ ...
Trial download Apr 8, 2010

Good suggestion from Claire, but depends how big your pdf is - when I used the trial version it only gave me a couple of pages of my pdf.

Have you already given your price to your client? I charge by the hour for pdfs, which tends to make clients give me the material in word format!
 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 14:20
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
An answer Apr 8, 2010

Louise Souter wrote:
But the pdf my client sent me converts to word as an image.


That is either because your PDF2DOC program is broken or your PDF is a non-textual (image-based) PDF which can only be converted using an OCR program.

If your client regularly sends you these, try converting it to black/white image and counting the black pixels, and charging for it... no, just joking!
 


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Word counts in pdf







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