PDF to Word converter
The text of a PDF as an editable Word document, with its headings and paragraphs. Nothing is uploaded.
No PDF yet.
To keep the pages as pictures instead, use PDF to JPG.
What this keeps: the text in reading order, headings as real Word headings, paragraphs joined back up across line and page breaks, bold and italic, and list items. What it does not: the layout, columns set side by side, tables, images, fonts and colours, and it takes out running headers, footers and page numbers. Scanned PDFs have no text to take out, and are refused rather than turned into an empty document.
What comes across, and what does not
A PDF is not a document in the way a Word file is. It is a set of instructions for where to put each letter on a page, and it holds no idea of a paragraph, a heading or a column. Turning one back into something editable means working those out again from where the letters sit and how large they are.
This page does that for the parts that can be recovered reliably. Text comes out in reading order. Lines set noticeably larger than the body become real Word headings, so they appear in the navigation pane and in a table of contents. Lines are joined back into paragraphs, including a paragraph the page break happened to cut in half. Bold and italic come across, and list items keep their bullets or numbers.
The page design does not. Columns set side by side, tables, images, fonts and colours all stay behind, and the result is set in plain Calibri on A4. For a letter, a report or a contract made of words, that is usually exactly what you wanted. For a brochure, it is not what this tool is for.
Scanned PDFs have no text to take out
A scan is a photograph of each page. It may look like text, but to a computer it is a picture, and getting words out of a picture needs text recognition, which this page does not do. Rather than hand you a Word document with nothing in it, which would look like success, it tells you so.
If what you need is the pages themselves, the PDF to JPG converter turns each one into an image, and works on scans as well as any other PDF.
Headers, footers and page numbers
Most PDFs repeat a line at the top or bottom of every page: a title, a date, a reference, a page number. Copied across faithfully, those would land in the middle of paragraphs wherever a page used to end. This page finds them because the same line sits in the same margin on most pages, with only the number changing, and leaves them out. The note after converting says how many were removed.
When the exact layout matters
If you still have the Word file the PDF was made from, use that: nothing rebuilt from a PDF will match it. Word on a computer can also open a PDF directly, from File then Open, and tries to rebuild the layout as well as the text, which suits a designed document better than this page does.
To go the other way, the Word to PDF converter turns a .docx into a PDF, and it also runs entirely in your browser.
Your PDF stays on your computer
The PDF is read in your browser's memory, the Word document is written there, and it is handed straight back to you. There is no upload, no queue, no account, and no copy anywhere else, which matters because the PDFs people most want to edit are contracts, statements and letters.
Common questions
- Is my PDF uploaded?
- No. The text is read out of the PDF and the Word document is written in your browser, on your own device. Nothing is sent to us or anyone else, and nothing is stored.
- Why does the Word document look different from the PDF?
- Because a PDF does not store paragraphs, columns or tables. It stores where every letter sits on the page. This page reads the letters back and works out the headings and paragraphs from their size and spacing, then writes an ordinary Word document with them. The words and their structure come across; the page design does not.
- Can it convert a scanned PDF?
- No. A scanned PDF is a picture of each page with no text inside it, and reading text off a picture needs text recognition, which this page does not do. It says so rather than handing you an empty document. You can still turn the pages of a scan into images with the PDF to JPG converter.
- What happens to tables?
- Their text comes across in reading order, line by line, as ordinary paragraphs rather than as a Word table. If the table is what you need, retyping it or rebuilding it from the original file will be quicker than repairing it.
- Why is there a hyphen in the middle of a word?
- Because the word was broken across two lines in the PDF. The hyphen is kept rather than guessed away, since removing it would also fuse genuine hyphenated words such as well-known into words that do not exist. A stray hyphen is easy to spot and delete; a silently fused word is not.
- Which programs can open the file?
- Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, Apple Pages and Google Docs. The document is set up for A4 paper in British English, and its headings use Word’s own heading styles, so they appear in the navigation pane and in a table of contents.