PatchmanBefore you start
A text-based PDF and an available conversion service.
1. Check that the PDF contains text
Try selecting a sentence in a PDF viewer. A scan can look like text while containing only an image.
2. Run the conversion
Open PDF to Word and read the server-processing notice. Select the PDF, convert and save the DOCX output.
3. Clean up the Word document
Review paragraphs, columns, tables and page breaks. Compare the result with the PDF before making further changes.
Check the result
Check reading order in multi-column pages and whether headers have been mixed into body text. Conversion results need review even when the page initially looks correct.
What to know
This workflow does not provide OCR. Scanned PDFs can produce an empty or unusable document. Layout reconstruction is not the same as recovering the original Word file.