PDF ↔ Word

PDF to Word. Word to PDF.

Someone sent you a PDF and you need to change one sentence. Or you wrote something in Word and want to send it as a PDF so it looks the same everywhere. Both directions, on your own device: your contract never visits a server to get converted.

How good is PDF to Word?

A PDF is a picture of a page with words placed on it. There's no “paragraph” or “heading” inside, so this tool works them out from the sizes and gaps: headings, body text, bullets, bold and italic, pictures, page size and margins. For letters, reports, contracts and CVs that gives you a Word file you can just keep typing in. Multi-column layouts and tables come out as plain lines of text and may need a tidy-up.

Scanned PDFs

A scan is a photo of paper, no text inside at all. Leave “Read scanned pages” on and those pages go through text recognition first, in the language you pick. It takes a bit longer, and the odd word may need a correction, but you get real, editable text instead of a picture.

And Word to PDF?

The Word file is read page by page, and laid out again as a PDF with real, selectable text: headings, lists, tables, pictures, colours, header and footer with page numbers. The fonts are Noto Sans and Noto Serif, so a line may break slightly differently than in Word. Text boxes, charts, footnotes and equations are not drawn; when that happens the result says so, so you can check.

Old .doc files

Only .docx works here, the format Word has used since 2007. Got an older .doc, or a .pages or .odt? Open it in Word, Google Docs or LibreOffice, choose Save As and pick Word Document (.docx). Then drop it here.