PDF to Word
Turn the text of a PDF into a Word document you can edit. This tool extracts text only, arranged into paragraphs, one PDF page per Word page; it does not copy layout, images, tables or fonts.
Off: lines are joined into flowing paragraphs, which is easier to edit. On: every line in the PDF stays a separate line, which suits poems, addresses and lists.
Text preview
Your PDF is read and converted inside your browser. The file and the Word document are never sent to our server.
How to use the PDF to Word
- Drop a PDF onto the box above, or click it to pick a file from your device.
- Leave Keep the PDF's line breaks off if you want normal flowing paragraphs. Turn it on for text where every line matters, such as verse or an address block.
- Press Convert to Word. The text is read page by page and a .docx file downloads with the same name as your PDF.
- Check the preview and the notice box: if a page had no text, it was most likely scanned and will only contain a placeholder line.
- Open the file in Word, Google Docs or LibreOffice and apply your own fonts and formatting.
What this converter does, and what it doesn't
A PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores small pieces of text, each with a position on the page. This tool uses PDF.js, the open-source PDF engine from Mozilla, to read those pieces, groups the ones that share a baseline into lines, and starts a new paragraph wherever the gap between two lines is clearly bigger than the normal line spacing. Text that is noticeably larger than the rest of the page is kept as a bold heading. Each PDF page ends with a page break, so page 3 of the PDF begins on a new page in Word.
That is all it carries over. The Word file will not contain the original fonts, colors, columns, images, tables, headers and footers, links or form fields. Tables arrive as lines of text with tabs between the cells, and two-column layouts may read across both columns rather than down one and then the other. If you need the page to look the same, keep the PDF; if you need the words so you can edit or reuse them, this is the right tool.
Scanned PDFs and OCR
A scanned document is a photo of a page wrapped in a PDF. There is no text inside it to extract, only pixels. Recognizing letters in those pixels is called optical character recognition (OCR), and this tool does not do it. When a page has no text, you will see which page numbers were affected. If the whole file is scanned, the tool tells you instead of handing you an empty document.
Tips for a cleaner result
- Run a find-and-replace for double spaces or stray hyphens after converting, especially with justified text.
- Page numbers and running headers in the PDF become ordinary lines of text. Delete them in Word if you don't want them.
- If paragraphs are merged together, try again with line breaks kept and tidy up by hand.
Frequently asked questions
Will my Word document look exactly like the PDF?
No. Only the text is extracted, arranged into paragraphs with a page break after each PDF page. Fonts, images, tables, columns, colors and positioning are not kept. Expect to reapply formatting yourself.
Why is my converted document empty or showing "no text found"?
Those pages contain an image of text, usually because the document was scanned or photographed. This tool cannot recognize text in images (it has no OCR), so it can only report which pages were affected.
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. The PDF is opened and converted with JavaScript in your browser tab, and the .docx file is created on your device. The PDF.js and JSZip libraries are downloaded from the jsDelivr CDN, but your file never leaves your computer.
Can it open password-protected PDFs?
Not if the PDF needs a password to open. Remove the password in a PDF reader you trust and try again. You will see an error message rather than a broken file.
Why are some words run together or split oddly?
Some PDFs position each letter or word separately with no space characters between them. The tool adds spaces based on the gaps it measures, which works for most files but can occasionally guess wrong, for example with very tight letter spacing.
What happens to tables?
Each table row becomes a line of text, with tab characters where the tool detected a wide gap between cells. You can turn those lines back into a table in Word with Insert › Table › Convert Text to Table.
Sources: ECMA-376 Office Open XML file formats (the .docx standard); PDF.js, Mozilla's open-source PDF library