Copy text from pdf to word for editing

Launch this program after you have completed its installation. Moreover, you can drag and drop the PDF file to its main interface directly as well. Choose Settings on the toolbar. Mark before one option, and then click OK to save your change. Choose whether to convert the entire PDF file or not. If you choose the latter option, you need to set the start page and the end page manually. Be aware that its maximum page range ups to 5 pages.

Select Browse to change your destination folder. At last, click the Convert button to copy text from secured PDF to word document in a short time.

When the process finishes, you can see a popping-up notification, click OK to confirm. So you can deal with basic PDF to word conversion for free. In addition, Google Drive also allows users to copy and paste from copy-protected PDF to word as well. Search and open Google Drive site on your web browser. Sign into your Google account with your Google email address and related password. Later, find and click NEW option in blue on the top left corner. Select File upload from its drop-down menu.

As a result, you can see a new popping-up window. Choose the PDF file you want to import, and then click Open to confirm. Don't waste time copying text manually, let us do the work for you!

We also do not obtain any rights on your documents. Of course, you could convert your PDF to other document formats as well!

On the train, bus, vacation, at work or at home — all you need is an internet connection! When I copy text out of a PDF file and into a text editor, it ends up mangled in a variety of ways. Formatting like bold and italics are lost; soft line breaks within a paragraph of text are converted to hard line breaks; dashes to break a word over two lines are preserved even when they shouldn't be; and single and double quotes are replaced with?

Ideally, I'd like to be able to copy text from a PDF and have formatting converted to HTML codes, 'smart quotes' converted to ' and ', and line breaks done properly. Is there any way to do this? Firstly, you have to understand what a PDF is. PDFs are designed to mimic a printed page, and they are designed only as an output format, not an input format. In most cases , a PDF does not even store information about where one word ends and another begins, much less things like soft breaks vs.

A few recent PDFs do store some information about this stuff, but that's a new technology, and you'd be lucky to find PDFs like that. Even if you did, your PDF viewer might not know about it. Anyway, it's up to your software to implement some kind of 'artificial intelligence' to extract merely from the locations of individual characters what is a word, what is a paragraph, and so on.

Different software is going to do this better than others, and it's also going to depend on how the PDF was made. In any case, you should never expect perfect results. Having the output PDF is not the same as having the source document. Far better to try to obtain that if you can. Even that is not going to get perfect results. There is free software that can be used to extract text from PDFs with some of formatting intact, but again, don't expect perfect results.

This article was written by Darlene Antonelli, MA. Darlene has experience teaching college courses, writing technology-related articles, and working hands-on in the technology field.

She earned an MA in Writing from Rowan University in and wrote her thesis on online communities and the personalities curated in such communities. This article has been viewed 46, times.

If the PDF was scanned into the computer from a physical document or it has copy-protection, however, you'll need to use Google Drive to convert the text before you can transfer your document to Word. Need help creating, merging, or converting PDF files?

Try wikiHow's PDF Toolkit , a free and easy-to-use custom tool to help you be more productive with your documents. Select the text in the document. Copy the text. Open a new document in Word. Paste the copied text. Did this summary help you? Yes No. Log in Social login does not work in incognito and private browsers.

Please log in with your username or email to continue. No account yet? Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great. By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Cookie Settings. Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article methods. Related Articles. Article Summary. Method 1. If the PDF you intend to copy from was created from a text document on a computer, you may be able to select and copy the text in the PDF from here.

If the PDF you want to copy from was scanned, you won't be able to use this method. If you don't have Adobe Reader yet, you can download and install it for free.

You can do this by clicking the Edit tab on the top-left side of the Acrobat Reader window Windows or in the top-left side of the screen Mac , and Select All from the drop-down menu.

If you want to select specific text, you can drag and drop your mouse over the text you want to highlight it in blue. If the whole document becomes highlighted in blue, the document cannot be copied and pasted as text. You'll need to use Google Drive instead. If your PDF is more than one page long, you'll have to go back and copy the other pages individually after pasting in this page's contents.

When you open Word, you'll be prompted if you want to open a new document or resume a previously created one, click to open a new document. You should see the text from the PDF appear in the document. You can also right-click the page and click Paste in the drop-down menu.

Method 2. Open your PDF in Preview.