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I'm looking for a software, which is able to convert a pdf document into a docx file. I know there is Adobe Acrobat Professional which does a good job concerning this. The drawback is that it costs money. I want a software which can do this for free.

Requirements:

  • free of charge
  • output either doc or docx
  • should be able to handle pictures, tables and text in the document
  • should convert documents with 15 and more pages in one run
  • Windows or Linux
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    Well, I know that Foxit Phantom is able to do that (foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Security/convert-export.php) But it's not free therefore I cannot post it as an answer. However, you can use the trial maybe? – Mohammed Joraid Feb 19 '14 at 7:48
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    There are plenty of SaaS options... this is one of many – Mike Pennington Feb 19 '14 at 9:10
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    Word 2013 will do this. Just open the PDF from within Word. I don't include it as an answer because Word is not free. – John Feb 23 '14 at 2:08
  • You want text to remain selectable/searchable I guess? Many converters just include everything as unmodifiable images, you should say that you don't want that. – Nicolas Raoul♦ Apr 23 '14 at 4:57
  • Related: askubuntu.com/questions/240011/…. Nothing there that seems to support tables though. – mic Mar 4 '15 at 21:18
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Libre Office is completely free office suite that can open and edit pdf files.

You can run it on Windows and Linux (also, Mac OS X)

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    Adding more details would be great ;) – Nick Wilde May 27 '14 at 15:27
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    You can edit text boxes in LibreOffice Draw, but you can't convert the PDF files to anything but image files. – mic Mar 4 '15 at 21:11
  • LibreOffice Draw loads each page as a drawing and tables are not really supported. Each cell is converted to a separate text field, so you can't navigate between cells using tab and shift-tab. Still +1 since I guess that a pdf never stores the relation between text in different cells, so I don't believe that any existing software can recognize a table in a pdf file as such. – user829755 Nov 8 '15 at 10:44
  • Have to take back my last sentence since Easy Converter (see Nick Wilde's answer) does seem to be good at recognizing tables, too. – user829755 Nov 8 '15 at 11:02
  • No it can't. That is, it can't open and edit PDFs as documents. – einpoklum Oct 16 '17 at 22:44
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There are two free web apps that do this quite well:

In particular, Sejda works for up to 200 pages.

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    SmallPDF worked really well for me, all completely free. – jbk Jun 12 '17 at 19:26
  • SmallPDF didn't work for me, it just converts the PDF to a image stored in a Word file. Useless. – Ola Ström Feb 7 at 23:22
  • Sedja worked ok, but the document layout in the converted Word file could have been better. – Ola Ström Feb 7 at 23:24
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Easy Converter.

It has a (free) online mode or the desktop (Windows) app for $20 (USD) - with a free trial.

I have only used the online version however it was very accurate. and now to go over your specific requirements one by one:

  • free of charge: Online: Yes, Desktop: No: Free Trial available - $20 for full version.
  • output either doc or docx: No; exports as RTF; that is openable in pretty much any version of word however.
  • should be able to handle pictures, tables and text in the document yeah pretty well though some users have found table export to be unreliable.
  • should convert documents with 15 and more pages in one run: Trial version only supports first three pages and adds an advertising page at the end.
  • Windows or Linux: Windows
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  • not able to handle tables well,i tried :| – Alok Mar 19 '14 at 9:17
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As suggested by Nickolai you may use LibreOffice for PDF to Word conversion that works pretty well for reasonably simple PDF files.

LibreOffice has some utilities like convert that allow you to run it headless from the command line in Linux, Windows and MAC so you can do the conversions in the background.

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To open a PDF in LibreOffice Writer, you need to choose "PDF - Portable Document Format (Writer)" in the File Open dialog:

image description

Then you can save it in whatever format you wish (to odt, to doc, to docx).

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