PDF to Word

Text PDFs vs scanned PDFs

A PDF created from a word processor or a web page stores its text as real characters, which this tool reads directly and accurately. A scanned PDF is different: each page is a photograph of paper, and there are no characters to extract until OCR (optical character recognition) reads them from the picture.

The quick test is to open the PDF and try to select a sentence. If it highlights word by word, the text is real. If the whole page highlights as one block, or nothing highlights at all, it's a scan and the tool will report that no text was found — convert the pages with PDF to JPG, then run them through Image to Text.

What the Word file will look like

• Each line of the PDF becomes its own paragraph, because PDFs store lines rather than paragraphs. Use Word's Find and Replace to join lines if you need flowing text.
• A page break separates the text of each original page.
• Fonts, colours, columns, tables and images aren't rebuilt — tables arrive as rows of plain text.
• Text laid out in two or more columns may be read straight across them, so check the order on multi-column pages.
• Right-to-left languages can come out in reversed or mixed order in some PDFs, depending on how the file was made.

Getting the best result

The tool is ideal for getting the words out of a PDF so you can quote, edit, translate or reuse them. If you need the original design as an editable layout — a brochure or a form — recent versions of Microsoft Word can open PDFs directly and try to rebuild the layout, with mixed results on complex designs.

A quick clean-up pass after converting usually covers everything: delete the headers and page numbers repeated on every page, join broken lines, and fix hyphenated words split across lines.