How the Word file is put together

Every PDF page becomes its own section

Each page of the PDF turns into a separate section in the Word file, with the same page size and orientation as the original. A landscape page in the middle of a portrait report stays landscape. The margins of each section are measured from where the content actually sits on that page, so a page with a wide layout gets narrow margins in Word.

This keeps the pages lined up with the PDF, but every section begins on a new page, so if you add a paragraph to page 3, the overflow lands on an extra page and page 4 still starts on the page after it. You end up with half-empty pages. When you've finished checking the conversion, remove the section breaks: in Word, open Replace, click More, then Special, choose Section Break, and replace with nothing.

Running headers, footers and page numbers from the PDF arrive as ordinary paragraphs at the top and bottom of each page. They aren't Word headers, so they won't update. Delete them and add Word's own page numbers if you need them.

Headings, fonts and colours

The converter first finds the body text size, the size used by most characters in the pages you converted. Paragraphs are then compared with it. Text at least 1.6 times the body size becomes Heading 1, at least 1.3 times becomes Heading 2, and slightly larger text of up to three lines becomes Heading 3. With 11 pt body text, an 18 pt title is Heading 1, a 15 pt section title Heading 2 and a 13 pt subheading Heading 3, while a 12 pt line stays normal text. Because these are real Word heading styles, an automatic table of contents works straight away.

Font names are copied from the PDF, and the font used by most of the text becomes the document's default. If a font isn't installed on your computer, Word swaps in another one, and lines and pages break in different places. Install the font, or select everything and pick one you have.

Near-white text is changed to black so it doesn't disappear on a white page. The exception is text sitting on a coloured box, like a white heading on a blue banner. There the box becomes paragraph shading and the text keeps its colour.

How pictures and tables are carried over

Pictures aren't copied out of the PDF as they're stored. The page is drawn at up to twice its normal size, and each picture area is cut out and saved as a JPEG at 90% quality. Anything drawn on top of a photo, such as arrows or labels, comes along as part of it. A logo with a transparent background gets a white one.

A few pictures are left out on purpose. Very small ones are skipped, and so is a large background image with a lot of text printed over it, so that the text stays editable instead of being frozen into a picture. Pictures inside a table are dropped too.

Tables drawn with lines get thin grey borders in Word. Tables laid out with spacing alone stay borderless. Merged cells are kept as merged cells, and cells containing numbers are right-aligned.