PDF INTO EDITABLE TEXT
PDF to Word
Pull the text out of a PDF and download it as a Word document you can actually edit. Nothing is uploaded, the whole conversion happens on your own device.
Drop a PDF here, or browse
PDF files that contain real text. Nothing is uploaded anywhere
Reading the PDF
Frequently asked questions
Yes. No account, no trial, no watermark, no page limit. Convert as many PDFs as you want.
No. It gets opened and read inside your browser, on your own device, and nothing gets sent anywhere. That matters for contracts, statements, CVs, anything you would rather not hand to a stranger's server.
No, and that is worth being upfront about. This pulls out the text, so you get accurate, editable words in a clean document. Columns, tables, images and exact positioning do not survive the trip. If you need the words, this does the job well. If you need a pixel perfect copy of the layout, no browser based tool will manage that, and I would be lying if I told you otherwise.
Almost certainly because it is a scanned PDF. A scan is a picture of a page, so there is no text inside the file to extract, no matter how good the tool is. Use the photo to text tool instead, which reads the letters visually through optical character recognition.
Yes. It runs in any modern mobile browser, so you can convert a PDF and download the DOCX without installing anything.
Not on ones that need a password just to open. Strip the protection first in whatever program you normally use, then convert the unlocked copy.
It is a standard DOCX, so Microsoft Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer, Apple Pages, anything that reads Word documents will open it.
A PDF to Word converter that never uploads your file
Drop in a PDF, get the text back as an editable Word document. The whole thing happens inside your browser, so the file stays on your device from start to finish. No account to make, no watermark on the result, no cap on how many documents you run through it.
Most free PDF to Word services online work the other way around. Your document gets uploaded to their servers, converted there, and held for some stretch of time before deletion, allegedly. Fine for a takeaway menu. Not fine for an employment contract, a bank statement, a medical letter, or a signed agreement, since that means handing a private document to a company you know nothing about. This sidesteps the whole question, because there is no server involved to begin with.
What you get, and what you do not
Being straight about this saves disappointment later. What comes out is the text of your PDF, in reading order, as genuine editable content in a DOCX file. What does not come out is the visual design. Multiple columns flatten into a single flow, table grids disappear, images do not carry over, fonts and spacing are not reproduced.
For most reasons people actually convert a PDF, that is exactly the right trade. Common ones include:
- Editing a document when the original file is long gone and all you have is the PDF
- Reusing text from a report, a paper or a proposal without retyping it
- Getting a CV out of PDF form so it can be updated for a new application
- Pulling quotes, clauses or references out of a long document
- Feeding text into a translator, a summariser or a notes app
Text based PDFs and scanned PDFs are not the same thing
This is the single most common source of confusion, so it is worth getting straight. A PDF made by exporting from Word, Google Docs, a browser, or almost any design program holds the actual characters as data. That is a text based PDF, and this tool reads it cleanly.
A PDF made by a scanner, or by photographing pages, contains only images. The words are visible to you but there is nothing for software to extract, because as far as the file is concerned each page is one picture. If you drop one of those in here you will get little or nothing back. The fix is optical character recognition, which reads letters visually, and that is what the photo to text tool on this site does.
A quick way to tell which kind you have: open the PDF and try to select a sentence with your cursor. If the text highlights, it is text based. If you can only draw a box over it, it is a scan.
How to convert a PDF to Word
Drop the file onto the tool above, or click to browse for it. The text is pulled out page by page and appears in the box, where you can read it over and fix anything that came through oddly before exporting. Press download and you get a DOCX file that opens in Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice or Pages.
Once you have the text, the photo to PDF converter is there if you need to turn the edited result back into a PDF later. If you only need to fix a line or two rather than pull out the whole document, the PDF editor is usually faster, and there is a short explainer on how a free PDF editor actually works if you are curious what it is doing under the hood.