What a conversion can keep
Text, paragraphs, heading styles, bold and italic runs, inline images and simple tables usually survive. Page size and basic margins are carried over too.
The trouble starts with anything that depends on absolute positioning: multi-column layouts, text boxes, sidebars, footnotes and overlapping graphics.
Convert the file
Do the comparison before you start editing. Fixing structure first is faster than fixing it after you have rewritten paragraphs.
- Open the PDF to Word tool.
- Select the PDF you want to convert.
- Run the conversion and download the .docx file.
- Open it in Word and compare it with the original PDF, page by page.
Fix what moved
Most repairs are small: re-set a column, realign a table row, re-apply a heading style. If a font was not embedded in the PDF, Word substitutes one, so line breaks shift slightly.
If a page must look exactly like the PDF and you do not need to edit it, convert those pages to images instead. That keeps the appearance but gives you no editable text.
A scanned PDF is a picture of a page, not text. Without a text layer there is nothing for the converter to turn into paragraphs.
Check before you send it on
Verify tables, page breaks, headers and footers, and numbered lists. These are the elements most likely to look right at a glance and wrong on a closer read.