I suppose that you already know that the Portable Document Format that is so popular today originated in the early years of the 1990s, 1993 to be more specific. This is the year when Adobe Systems launched PDF even though they had been working on the project to create PDF for the previous two years. This format was created for the purposes of sharing document more conveniently with all the elements that documents contain such as inline images, tables, and formatting. This format allows shared documents to open on all kinds of systems and platforms regardless of the operating system, software, or hardware.
In this article, I am going to look at how you can manually convert a PDF document to a word document without using a PDF to word converter. It is important to point out that this process takes a little bit of time because it is done manually. However, it presents the advantage where you don’t need any sophisticated tools to complete the conversion. All you will need is a text editor and a free version of Adobe Reader.
Save a PDF as a text file
You will need to start the process by opening the PDF document you intend to convert using your Adobe Reader program. You can do this easily by clicking on the File menu and then choosing the “Save and Other” option and then concluding by selecting Text. At this point, you should type in the name of the file and click on the save button. Adobe Reader usually has an option for saving PDF documents directly as MS word files online, but it remains disabled in the free version of the software.
Open your new text-based file using a text editor
Once you have saved your PDF document as a text file, you will need to open it using a text editor. Again, there are several text editors on the internet that you can easily download and use. You can also use free text editors that come as part of the Windows operating system and use it. when the document opens, you should select all the text it contains to the clipboard. You can copy all the text in your text editor using the Ctrl + A keyboard shortcut. The keyboard shortcut for copying text in your text editor is Ctrl + C.
Once you have copied the text, you should paste it into MS word program using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + V. You can alternatively use the paste command found in your MS word program under the print menu. This should paste all the text you copied from the text editor to your MS word program.
Manipulate the Word document
At this point, you can now proceed to manipulate the resulting MS word document any way you want. You might have to align the text appropriately, add page layout, spacing, and formatting. If the original PDF document contained a table, you can add it into your word document too using the table feature in word. Your work will be done at this point.
