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Open a PDF and it becomes a Word document, or the other way round. The file is converted in this tab and never uploaded.
Every PDF-to-Word site wants your document on their server. This one has no
endpoint; turn off your wifi after it loads and it still works.
1. Open a file
Drop a PDF or a .docx here, or click to chooseNothing is uploaded; it is opened inside this tab
2. How well this will go
There is no text in this PDF to convert.
It is a scan: a photograph of a page. The only way through is to read
the letters off the picture, which is what this does. It downloads about
8 MB the first time, runs in this tab like everything else, and is
slower than it looks: a page takes a few seconds. Proofread what comes out.
Headings not right? Nudge it, and this browser will
remember for the next document from the same source.
Preview
The first part of what came out, so you can see the structure before you open it.
A PDF in, a .docx out, or the other way round.
PDF was designed to look the same everywhere, not to be edited. Some PDFs
carry a hidden description of their own structure: which text is a
heading, what belongs in which table cell, what order it reads in. Anything
saved out of Word, Google Docs or LibreOffice usually does. For those, this is a
translation, and it is very good.
The rest (scans, LaTeX papers, output from older tools) are just
positioned letters on a page. Nothing in the file says where a paragraph starts,
so the structure has to be worked out from the layout. That is a reconstruction,
and no converter on earth does it perfectly. The difference here is that you are
told which of the two you have before you convert, and what to check
afterwards.
Is this actually private?
Nothing is uploaded. Static page, no endpoint, no account. Both directions run in your browser.
EPUB is the better choice for reading a long PDF. A PDF is a fixed page, so on a phone you pinch and pan across a sheet designed for A4. An EPUB re-flows to whatever screen and text size you like, and chapters are split at the document's own top-level headings. It carries the words, the headings, the lists and the tables, but not the page design, which is the entire point of the format.
PDF → Word is a conversion, not a photocopy. It recovers the content and structure (text, headings, lists, tables, reading order) and lays it out cleanly in Word. It does not reproduce the original page design pixel for pixel, because a Word document re-flows and a PDF does not. Anyone promising both is promising something the two formats cannot both be.
Tagged PDFs convert far better, and it says which yours is. The verdict above is read out of your actual file, not guessed from its size.
Scans are read with optical recognition. If a PDF is a photograph of a page there is no text in it, so the letters are read off the picture, in this tab, with a recogniser served from this domain rather than a cloud service. It is good on a clean scan and poor on a crooked phone photo, it recovers words rather than layout, and it needs proofreading. The page tells you when it has taken this route.
Word → PDF re-typesets the document. Real, selectable, searchable vector text, not a picture, but the lines break where this typesetter breaks them, not exactly where Word would. Matching Word's pagination needs Word's own fonts, which are not free to redistribute.
What it does not carry across: headers and footers, footnotes, comments, embedded images, columns, and text boxes. Those are dropped rather than mangled. Tracked changes are accepted, not preserved: an insertion is kept and a deletion removed, as if you had clicked Accept All, so a redlined draft converts to its final text rather than its markup.
It learns locally, and only locally. Correcting the heading detection stores a number in this browser, against the software that produced the PDF. Nothing is collected, because nothing is sent anywhere, which is also why it cannot learn from anyone else's documents.
It downloads about 700 KB the first time, to read PDFs (pdf.js) and write them (pdf-lib). The Word half needs nothing extra: a .docx is a ZIP of XML, and the browser already has a ZIP engine.
It wants a current browser. The PDF engine reads its pages the modern way, which a Safari older than 18.4 could not do until this page taught it how; older versions than that, or a browser more than a couple of years stale, may still fall short. If a conversion stops with a message about an iterator, that is what it means: update the browser, or open the file somewhere newer.
Nothing here is for sale, nothing is tracked, and there is no account to make.
If something saved you an hour: 83TQcTwusSQ4WKbPQE5osrF3cR4GWe2zmcNWeozK6BSqHSaeLvjUVe476ouVwLKn1uVwEFcbJQvnme7W6dTV5SB93x45DEy
You can
check that address here before sending anything.