PDF to Word

How it works

1. Drop the PDF, or several of them. Each one becomes its own .docx.
2. Press Convert to Word. The text and where it sits on each page are read, then put back together as lines, paragraphs and headings.
3. Download the .docx and open it in Word, LibreOffice, Pages or Google Docs. Expect to tidy the formatting; the words and their order are the part that comes across faithfully.

Frequently asked questions

Will it look exactly like the PDF?

No, and no honest converter can promise that. A PDF stores glyphs at coordinates, not paragraphs, so a converter has to work out what was a line, a paragraph and a heading. This one does that from the positions and the font sizes: you get flowing, editable text with headings marked, on A4 pages broken where the PDF's pages broke. Columns, tables, text boxes, images and exact spacing are not reproduced. If you need the layout preserved exactly, keep the PDF and edit it with the PDF tools here instead.

My PDF is a scan. Does that work?

Yes. A scan is pictures of pages with no text layer, so the page is read with the same recogniser the OCR tools use and the words come across as words you can edit. The first scanned file waits for the model to download; after that it is quick. What recognition cannot rescue is a photograph taken at an angle or in poor light — straighten and light the page and the difference is large. Layout is looser than on a text PDF, because a recogniser gives lines and boxes rather than paragraphs.

Are tables converted?

Not as tables. A table's cells become lines of text in reading order, which is usually readable but not a grid you can edit as one. Rebuilding real tables would mean guessing the ruling lines, and a wrong guess is harder to fix than plain text.

Does it handle Japanese, Chinese and Korean?

Yes, as long as the PDF carries real text. Lines are joined without inserting spaces where the language does not use them, which is the mistake that makes most converted Japanese unreadable. A PDF whose fonts have no Unicode mapping will come out as garbled characters in any converter, this one included.

Is my document uploaded?

No. The PDF is read and the Word file written in your browser, which is the reason to use this on a contract, a payslip or anything under an NDA rather than a site that asks you to upload first.

Can I go the other way, Word to PDF?

Yes — Word to PDF does it, in the same browser and with nothing uploaded. It keeps paragraphs and their alignment, headings, bold and italic, lists with their levels, tables with Word's own column widths and inline pictures. What it does not promise is Word's own pagination: Word stores paragraphs rather than pages, so where each page breaks is decided at the moment you open the file, by whichever machine opens it.

What are the free limits?

The free plan handles 3 files per run, 20 MB each and 10 runs per day. Pro removes these limits.