Convert PDF to Word

What you get, honestly

A PDF does not store paragraphs, headings or tables. It stores runs of characters at positions on a page. Octoolo reads every run with its place and size, joins the runs that share a line, groups lines that sit close together into a paragraph, and turns a short block set clearly larger than the body text into a heading. Words split by a hyphen at the end of a line are joined back together.

For a letter, a report, a contract, an article or an e-book set in one column, that gives a document you can edit straight away. What it does not give:

• Pictures, logos and signatures are left out.
• Tables come out as their words, line by line, not as a table.
• Columns are read in page order, so a two-column page gives the left column's text and then the right's.
• Fonts, colors and page layout are not kept; the .docx uses Documents' own styles.
• Scanned pages give nothing, because a scan holds a picture of the text, not the text.

Scans, forms and protected PDFs

If the PDF came from a scanner or a phone camera, there are no words in it to read, and the .docx comes out empty. Turn the pages into pictures first with PDF to JPG and read them with image to text, which uses Windows' own text recognition on your PC.

A fillable form converts as its printed text; the answers typed into its fields are not read. To keep a form as a form, fill it in the PDF Editor instead. A PDF locked with a password cannot be read until it is unlocked.

Checking the result

Open the .docx and read it through once. Headings are found from their size, so a document with little difference between heading and body sizes may show headings as ordinary paragraphs, and a large drop cap or a pull quote may become a heading; both are a one-click fix in Documents. Line breaks inside a paragraph are removed, which is what you want for editing, and page breaks are not carried over.

If the PDF is yours and you still have the original Word file, use that instead: nothing rebuilt from a PDF is as good as the source.