Serge Dugas 

Hi Serge,

The best form of PDF to import to Studio is a text only PDF. 

Studio is surprisingly good at importing PDFs even with images, despite not being purely OCR-based. Unfortunately, if a PDF has text that has been created as a flat image, this will create problems when importing to Studio. 

Anything other than image and text-accessible PDFs would be best converted to Word first via a piece of OCR software designed for the task, such as ABBYY FineReader which works very well. This helps avoid missing any unusual content that might not be picked up by Studio on conversion from PDF to Word.

The target file will indeed be a .docx... However, if you have Microsoft Office installed, it is easy to print any Word document to PDF even if you don't have Adobe Acrobat.

So that should be no problem if that is what the client wishes.

All the best,

Ali

Thank you very much for your very clear answer. It's appreciated.

Serge Dugas 

You're very welcome, I hope it proves helpful!

All the best

Ali

Hi Serge,

If the customer sends me a PDF file to translate, I always start by asking whether it was saved from InDesign.

If so (probably 8 or 9 times out of 10), I then ask the customer to save the original InDesign file as idml. That file can be translated directly in Studio (make sure you tick the box under File Types in the project settings), which makes life much easier both for you (no layout problems and no unnecessary formatting tags in the Studio file) and for the customer afterwards (no need to cut and paste).

The same applies incidentally to FrameMaker files, which can be saved as mif and translated directly in Studio.

When you save the target file in either case, you get idml or mif. The target file of a PDF is always docx (which can then be saved as PDF in Word, for instance, but will probably be far from perfect unless it's text-only).

Hope that helps,

Martin