PDF to Word: what converts cleanly and what does not

A PDF stores glyphs at coordinates, not paragraphs. That is why every PDF-to-Word converter is really a reconstruction: it guesses where lines, paragraphs and columns were meant to be.

What you can rely on

• Body text from digitally generated PDFs extracts accurately.
• Paragraph and line breaks are reconstructed from the text positions.
• The resulting .docx opens in Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice and Pages.

What will need manual work

• Multi-column layouts, which may be flattened into a single flow.
• Tables, which lose their grid structure.
• Images, headers, footers and precise fonts or spacing.

Scanned documents

If a PDF was produced by a scanner or camera, its pages are images with no text layer at all. Extraction returns nothing, and the only fix is optical character recognition. PDFQuick does not perform OCR, and we would rather tell you that up front than hand you an empty document.