How it works, tips and questions
Upload the PDF to PDF to Word, choose the document's language, and download an editable .docx. Scanned pages are read with OCR in English, Hindi and 11 other Indian languages.
Step by step
- Upload the PDF you want to edit.
- Wait while the layout is rebuilt as a Word document. Scanned pages are read with OCR first.
- Download the .docx and open it in Word, Google Docs or LibreOffice.
Good to know
Digital PDFs versus scanned PDFs
A PDF exported from Word or a web page already contains real text, so converting it back is mostly a matter of rebuilding the layout, and the result is usually very close to the original. A scanned PDF is a photograph of a page, with no text in it at all. Those go through OCR, which reads the shapes of the letters and turns them into characters. OCR is very good but not perfect, so proofread a scanned conversion before you rely on it.
What survives the conversion and what does not
Paragraphs, headings, basic tables and inline images come across well. Multi-column magazine layouts, text wrapped tightly around shapes, footnotes and complex table borders are where converters struggle, because a PDF stores the position of every character rather than the structure that produced it. The simpler the original layout, the cleaner the Word file.
Getting a better result from a scan
Set the document language first - it matters more than anything else you can control. OCR accuracy then depends on the quality of the scan. A straight, well-lit page at 300 DPI reads far better than a tilted phone photo in poor light. If you are scanning specifically to convert, use a scanner app rather than the plain camera, and make sure the page is flat, fully in frame and not in shadow.
Questions
Does this work on scanned PDFs?
Yes. Scanned pages are put through OCR automatically, so the text becomes selectable and editable rather than staying a picture.
Which languages does the OCR read?
English, plus Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Urdu and Sanskrit. Choose the document language before converting - Devanagari read as English produces nonsense. For papers that mix English with Hindi, the combined option reads both at once.
Will the formatting look exactly like the PDF?
Close, but rarely identical. Straightforward documents convert almost perfectly. Heavily designed layouts will need some tidying up in Word.
What file do I get back?
A .docx file, which opens in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice and Pages.
Can I convert a password-protected PDF?
Not directly. Remove the password with Unlock PDF first, then convert the unlocked file.
Why is the conversion taking a while?
Scanned documents take much longer than digital ones, because every page has to be read by OCR before anything can be written to Word.
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