Turn a PDF into an editable .docx you can revise, keeping paragraphs, tables and images in roughly the place they were.
Text becomes real, editable text, and simple layouts survive well: paragraphs, headings, bullet lists, basic tables. What never survives perfectly is anything that depends on exact positioning — multi-column magazine layouts, text wrapped around images, forms with fields in precise boxes. Expect to spend a few minutes tidying.
If the PDF is a scan, there is no text to extract and the Word file will contain images. Run OCR on it first, then convert: the searchable layer gives the converter something to work with.
PDF describes where each character sits on a page; Word describes a flowing document. Converting one into the other is a translation between two different ideas of a document, so a perfect match is impossible in principle. The goal is an editable starting point, not a facsimile.
Common fonts are matched; unusual ones are substituted, which can change line breaks.
Run OCR first, then convert — otherwise you will get images, not text.
Simple tables convert as tables. Complex nested tables usually need manual repair.