PDF to Word
A PDF does not contain paragraphs. It contains characters, each with a position on the page — the paragraphs, the headings and the reading order were thrown away when the file was written. This page reads those positions back and works out the structure again: characters sharing a baseline become a line, lines sitting close together become a paragraph, text set noticeably larger becomes a heading. That works well on an ordinary single-column document and badly on anything laid out as a grid. After every run it tells you which of the two you had.
- No upload
- No account
- No watermark
- No file limit
Your files
Best on ordinary single-column documents. Tables, multi-column pages and anything drawn as a diagram do not survive intact — the notes after the run say what happened to yours.
Only pages with no text at all are sent to OCR. It downloads a recognition engine the first time (about 15 MB), takes several seconds a page, and gives back plain text — no headings, no bold.
Off by default, so a paragraph split across two PDF pages is joined back together. Turn it on if the Word file has to paginate like the PDF.
Nothing chosen yet.
Where your file goes
Nowhere. This page downloads a small program into your browser, and that program reads the file straight from your disk. The program comes from this site like any image or stylesheet — but your file only ever travels from your disk into your own browser tab.
Why this one
What you get that the big converters cannot offer.
Paragraphs, not one line each
The usual free converter gives you one Word paragraph per printed line, so every sentence is chopped where the PDF happened to wrap and you cannot reflow a thing. This one joins the lines back up — including words split across a line with a hyphen — and starts a new paragraph only where the spacing, the indent, the font size or the boldness actually changes.
Headings become Word headings
Text set larger than the body is ranked by size and mapped to Heading 1, 2 and 3, so the navigation pane fills in and Insert → Table of Contents works. Bold and italic come from the font each run of characters was drawn with, not from guessing at the shapes.
Running headers and page numbers are dropped
The same line at the top of forty pages is not forty paragraphs of content. Lines sitting in the top or bottom margin that repeat across half the document, and bare page numbers, are removed — and the number removed is reported, so you can tell whether it took something it should not have.
It reports where it failed
Multi-column pages, table-like rows, pictures it could not cut out, sideways text and pages with no text at all are each counted and explained under the download button. You get to judge whether the result is good enough before you send it to anyone.
How to use it
Choose one or more PDFs. If any of them are scans, tick the OCR box before you start.
Press Start. Every page is read twice — once for the text, once to work out the layout — so a long document takes a while.
Download the .docx, then read the notes under the button. They say what did not survive.
When people use it
You need to edit two paragraphs of someone else’s PDF
Reusing a supplier’s terms, a clause from a contract, a section of a report. You want text you can change, not a picture of a page.
Getting the words out without retyping them
A proposal, an article or a manual that only exists as a PDF, and the body text has to end up somewhere you can work on it.
The file cannot go to a stranger’s server
Contracts, medical letters, payslips, anything under an NDA. Every other converter wants the file uploaded before it will do anything.
Questions
Will the Word file look like the PDF?
No, and it is not trying to. This is not a layout copier. It puts the text back in reading order using Word’s own styles, on a page the same size as the original with margins taken from where the text actually sits. Line breaks, exact fonts, letter spacing, columns and anything drawn as vector art are not reproduced. If you need something that looks identical, what you need is the PDF.
What happens to tables?
They do not come out as Word tables. A PDF does not record a table — only cells of text that happen to line up. When a line has wide gaps inside it, those gaps become tab characters and the line becomes its own paragraph, so the data is all there and in the right order. To get a real table back, select those lines in Word and use Insert → Table → Convert Text to Table with Tabs as the separator. The report says how many lines came out that way.
What about two-column pages?
They are found by looking for a vertical strip down the page that no line crosses, and then each column is read top to bottom in turn — which is the correct reading order, and it is reported so you can check. Three columns work the same way. What breaks it is a page where the columns start and stop halfway down, or a sidebar that overlaps the main text; those come out interleaved and you will see it straight away.
My PDF is a scan and the Word file is empty.
A scanned page is a photograph of paper. There are no characters in it to read, so there is nothing to convert. Tick “Read scanned pages with OCR” and those pages get recognised instead — but the OCR here only has English, it takes several seconds a page, and what comes back is plain text with no headings and no bold. If your scan is not in English this tool cannot help you, and no setting will change that.
Are bold and italic reliable?
They come from the font each run of characters was drawn with, so they are right whenever the document used a real bold or italic font — which is most of the time. They are wrong when a PDF faked bold by drawing each outline twice, and they can be wrong for a slanted regular font. Underline, text colour and highlighting are not carried over at all.
Can I convert several files at once?
Yes. Each PDF becomes its own .docx. Past three files they arrive as a single zip, because browsers block a run of downloads in a row and you would silently lose some. A PDF over 2 GB cannot be opened at all — a browser cannot read a file that large in one piece, and that is the browser’s limit, not ours.
Is my file uploaded?
No. The PDF is read off your disk by this page, the Word file is assembled in the tab, and the download comes out of your own browser. You can watch the network tab while it runs. The PDF reader and the OCR engine are downloaded from this site the first time, the way any script is — your document is not part of that.
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