PDF Converter

PDF is a rendering, not a document

This one fact explains most of what is surprising about PDF conversion. A Word file describes structure — this is a heading, this is a table with three columns. A PDF describes the result of laying that structure out: place this glyph at this coordinate, draw a line from here to here.

So converting into PDF is reliable and converting out of PDF is inference. Going in, the layout is fixed exactly as it appeared and the fonts are embedded in the file, which is precisely why PDF is the format you send when appearance matters. Coming out, the converter has to reason backwards from where the marks are to what they were supposed to mean.

What each PDF conversion actually does

Scanned PDFs need a step first

A PDF from a scanner, a phone camera, or a fax contains a picture of a page, not characters. Converting it to text returns an empty file and converting it to Word returns a document full of images.

The fix is to run the searchable-PDF option first, which uses OCR to add an invisible text layer behind the page image. Once that layer exists, every normal conversion works. You can tell which kind you have in two seconds: open the PDF and try to select a sentence.

Working on the PDF itself

Not every job is a format change. PDFs can be merged into one file, split by page range, compressed to reduce size before emailing, previewed page by page before you commit to a conversion, and made searchable with OCR.

Those operations keep the file a PDF, which is often what you actually wanted — converting to Word and back to get a smaller file is a round trip that costs you layout for nothing.