PDF to Word

Worth knowing

• The file never leaves your computer. Every one of these tools runs inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no copy on a server, nothing to delete afterwards and no queue of other people’s documents next to yours.
• It needs a text layer. A PDF made by exporting from Word or a design tool carries its text as text, and that converts. A PDF that is a photograph of a page carries only pixels, and there is nothing to convert — this tool does no OCR, so a scan comes out as pictures.
• A form keeps its arrangement. A certificate, an invoice or a ruled form means something because of where things sit. Pages like that are rebuilt with every line anchored at its own position in a Word text box — still real, editable text, not a screenshot — so two columns do not collapse into one.
• Line breaks will move a little. Word measures text with its own font metrics, so a paragraph can end up a line longer or shorter than the PDF had it. Everything is there; the pagination is close rather than identical.
• Arabic and other right-to-left text works. Right-to-left runs are stored in reading order and anchored to the edge they start from, so an Arabic column comes back the right way round rather than reversed.