How to turn a PDF into an editable Word document
A PDF is a picture of a page that happens to carry some text. Turning it back into a Word document means working out the paragraphs, lists and tables from where each piece of text sits on the page. It works well for most documents, and it is useful to know where it does not.
What carries over well
- Paragraphs, headings and their sizes, bold, italic and colours.
- Bulleted and numbered lists, with their indents.
- Tables, including header shading and borders, when the text lines up in columns.
- Pictures, in the place they were on the page.
- Headers, footers and page numbers that repeat on every page.
- Pages of a different size, such as one landscape page in a portrait document.
Text PDF or scanned PDF?
Try selecting a word in your PDF. If you can highlight it, the PDF holds real text and converts well. If you cannot, the pages are photographs of paper, and there are no words to carry across.
Turning a photograph of text into words needs OCR (optical character recognition). PDF to Word does it for you: with "Read scanned pages" ticked, every page that is only a picture is read first, in the language you choose, and its words go into the Word file. It works well on a clean, straight, printed scan and less well on handwriting or a crooked phone photo, so check the result.
Why a result can still need tidying
A PDF does not remember what was a paragraph, a table or a column. The tool decides that from spacing, which is right most of the time and sometimes not: a table with merged cells may come out as separate cells, and two-column layouts can come out as one column.
Hindi and other Indian-language text depends on how the PDF was made. When the PDF stores the letters properly they come across; when it stores only the shapes, the tool reports that those letters could not be read rather than guessing.
Getting the cleanest result
- Start from the original PDF, not a printout that was scanned back in.
- Check the preview of page one, which is drawn from the Word file the tool will give you.
- After converting, switch on formatting marks in Word if something looks off. A stray space or a line break is usually the cause.
- For a long document, scan the headings and tables first; they are where small differences show most.
Privacy
The conversion runs in your browser. The PDF is not uploaded anywhere, which is the safe way to handle a bank statement, an offer letter or a contract.