How the converter works
What happens to a PDF on its way to Word, from the first page read to the DOCX that downloads.
Convert a PDF to Word in three steps
- Choose your PDF
Open the converter and pick the file, or drop it anywhere on that page. Several at once is fine.
- Convert it
Pick the language if the PDF is a scan and press Convert to Word. Each page shows as it is read, with the time left.
- Open it in Word
The Word file downloads by itself. Edit it in Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice or Pages.
What happens to each page
- The text is read with PDFium, the PDF engine inside Chrome: every character with its position and font, every picture with its place, and the lines that draw tables.
- Characters become lines and lines become paragraphs, each with the alignment, indent and spacing it had. Wrapped prose is joined again, while list items and labels stay separate. Grids of ruling lines become Word tables with the text in the right cells.
- A page with almost no text is read with OCR. It is drawn as a picture and passed to Tesseract, which returns every word and where it sits, and those words go through the same layout step.
- Everything is written as Word paragraphs, tables and pictures, with a page break between pages and the page size, orientation and margins of the PDF.
How long it takes
Why each of these steps is harder than it sounds, and what is not handled yet, is on the challenges page.
A PDF with text you can select converts in seconds. Drawing a page takes about a tenth of a second and reading it with OCR one to two seconds, and several scanned pages are read at once, so a 250-page scan takes a couple of minutes on a computer with several cores.
Convert PDF to Word on any device
In your browser
The converter is a web page, so it works the same on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iPhone. On a phone, choose the PDF from your files and the Word document is saved to your downloads.
On your own computer
The whole converter is one open source program. On Windows it carries the PDF engine and the text recognition inside it, so it converts without an internet connection and the files never leave the computer.
On your own server
The source comes with a Docker setup, so an office or a school can run its own copy for everyone on its network. The source code is on GitHub.
Convert your PDF to Word now
Free and without a sign-up. Choose a file, pick its language if it is a scan, and the Word document downloads when it is done.
Convert a PDF to Word