When the original is gone and only the PDF is left
Club bylaws that need one new clause, last year's quote where only the prices change, a term paper saved as nothing but a PDF – the Word file no longer exists and retyping would take hours. PDF to Word builds a DOCX document in which text, paragraphs, tables and images sit as close to the original as possible. The file opens in Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs.
Why results vary
A PDF doesn't know what a paragraph or a heading is; it only records where each character sits on the page. Paragraphs, columns and tables are rebuilt from those positions, so the outcome depends on the document:
- Exported from Word or a similar program, simple layout – the best case; text is editable right away.
- Tables, images or several columns – good, with the odd layout fix by hand.
- Brochures, magazines and other complex designs – the content comes across, but the layout may differ.
- Scanned paper – pages go into Word as images, so the text can't be edited; that takes OCR, which this tool does not do.
Three time savers
- Need two pages out of a long document? Pull them out first with Extract pages. A smaller file converts faster, and a very large one can run past the time allowed for a conversion.
- A password-protected PDF has to be opened with Unlock PDF before it can be converted.
- If plain text is all you want, PDF to text gets you there sooner.
What happens to the file
The conversion runs on our server with the open-source library pdf2docx. The PDF is kept only while it is being processed and is then deleted immediately, as is the Word document made from it.