Can I import PDF Documents?

The short answer is yes. Most PDF files can easily be imported directly with the all text formatting and optionally, with the images. PDF documents are converted into editable documents, storing them in rich-text format, just like any other document file type supported by QDA Miner. The conversion engine has been carefully designed to remove hyphens and unnecessary carriage returns, adjust the text flow in multi-column documents, and import tables and images correctly.

Despite advanced importation features, some PDF documents may still not be imported properly. Some PDF files consist of scanned images of the original document and contain no text at all. These can be easily recognized by the fact that it is not possible to select any text segment or that text searches never return any hits. Other documents may have quite complex layout designs, making their proper importation quite difficult. For those documents, we recommend pre-processing them with full-fledged OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software like Abbyy’s FineReader or Nuance’s OmniPage or by some PDF to Word conversion tools like PDF Transformer by Abbyy. Although the latest version of Acrobat Professional does include some OCR features, its performance was deemed not good enough to preserve the document structure.

We also recommend removing images or scaling down the graphic resolution of images to the lowest setting because images will significantly increase the resulting document size and will slow down the browsing and text-processing speed of QDA Miner and WordStat.