19

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
Improve this question
7
  • 1
    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
    Commented Feb 19, 2014 at 7:48
  • 1
    There are plenty of SaaS options... this is one of many
    – Mike Pennington
    Commented Feb 19, 2014 at 9:10
  • 2
    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
    Commented Feb 23, 2014 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 ♦
    Commented Apr 23, 2014 at 4:57
  • 1
    Related: askubuntu.com/questions/240011/…. Nothing there that seems to support tables though.
    – mic
    Commented Mar 4, 2015 at 21:18

7 Answers 7

Reset to default
5

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)

Improve this answer
6
  • 2
    Adding more details would be great ;)
    – Nick Dickinson-Wilde
    Commented May 27, 2014 at 15:27
  • 2
    You can edit text boxes in LibreOffice Draw, but you can't convert the PDF files to anything but image files.
    – mic
    Commented Mar 4, 2015 at 21:11
  • 1
    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
    Commented Nov 8, 2015 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
    Commented Nov 8, 2015 at 11:02
  • No it can't. That is, it can't open and edit PDFs as documents.
    – einpoklum
    Commented Oct 16, 2017 at 22:44
5

There are two free web apps that do this quite well:

In particular, Sejda works for up to 200 pages.

Improve this answer
4
  • 1
    SmallPDF worked really well for me, all completely free.
    – jbk
    Commented Jun 12, 2017 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
    Commented Feb 7, 2020 at 23:22
  • Sedja worked ok, but the document layout in the converted Word file could have been better.
    – Ola Ström
    Commented Feb 7, 2020 at 23:24
  • SmallPDF produced the same results that Easy Converter did (for me), and it seems to allow more than one conversion per day (but I haven't tried to see if there is some other limit yet). Meanwhile, Sejda did a better job at retaining the layout (I actually got the same count of pages as the original PDF); HOWEVER, it did this by creating lots of text boxes, which is more difficult to deal with than free-flowing text; still, nowhere near as painful as what LibreOffice does.
    – Jeff
    Commented May 11 at 18:00
4

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
Improve this answer
2
  • not able to handle tables well,i tried :|
    – Alok
    Commented Mar 19, 2014 at 9:17
  • This did a pretty good job on the PDF I tested it with that had text and a few graphics but no tables. The fonts were replicated; the margins weren't quite correct, resulting in a bit of work to reestablish the layout accurately. However, you get ONLY ONE free daily conversion (apparently per calendar day, as it's telling me that I have to wait ~12 hours to do the next one).
    – Jeff
    Commented May 11 at 17:38
2

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.

Improve this answer
1

Machine-readable PDF files can actually be opened in the current MS Word program. You just need to open the PDF using MS Word. A pop-up warning will appear and once you've confirmed this, it will open as a Word file where you can edit the content like a .doc file and save as PDF again once done. Word processor warning

However, this works only to machine-readable files. Meaning, if your PDF is a scanned file, the computer will only recognize your PDF as an image-only file and will only open it as an image on the word processor.

If you don't have MS Word or if you have a scanned PDF file with you, we suggest you try the software we are developing which is DeftPDF online. It has tools that can answer your requirements - can convert PDF to doc file, without limitations, can be used in any platform. For scanned files, you can use the OCR tool within the web-based app to convert the PDF into a machine-readable file. This converter tool (PDF to DOC or the OCR tool) is web-based though and needs to be operated online through your browser.

Improve this answer
1

I can't believe this is a seven year old question and that no one has yet mentioned the undisputed king of converters (and viewers), Calibre.

From the Faq:

What formats does calibre support conversion to/from?

calibre supports the conversion of many input formats to many output formats. It can convert every input format in the following list, to every output format.

Input Formats: AZW, AZW3, AZW4, CBZ, CBR, CB7, CBC, CHM, DJVU, DOCX, EPUB, FB2, FBZ, HTML, HTMLZ, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ

Output Formats: AZW3, EPUB, DOCX, FB2, HTMLZ, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PMLZ, RB, PDF, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ, ZIP

Calibre has been around since 2006, is open-source, stable, widely used (currently (Active installs: 3,389,907 (those that have started calibre at least once in the last 60 days)), and well supported, inluding a tag on SuperUser, and runs on Linux, Windows, Android, iOSiOS andmacOS.

Check out the demo

enter image description here

Improve this answer
1
  • My initial impression of the current version of Calibre (7.10) is that it does not work very hard to preserve basic properties such as font, margins, and page breaks -- in short, it is NOT WYSIWYG. There are a lot of settings that you could fiddle around with if you are inclined to spend all day at it, but no guarantees that your conversion will resemble what you started with. You will then spend hours in the destination app trying to regain what you've lost.
    – Jeff
    Commented May 11 at 17:18
1

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).

Improve this answer
1
  • Using LibreOffice 24.2.3.2, opening a pdf imports it into Draw, and only allows saving as odg, not "whatever format you wish"
    – Jeff
    Commented May 11 at 16:20

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.