Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Users Search
Help Dashboard Sign In Sign Up
Q&A Meta
Q&A
Posts Tags Edits
Ask Question

Comments on How to convert PDF to docx

Parent

How to convert PDF to docx

+4
−0

How can I convert PDF to docx using the terminal or a Linux app?

The output docx must be formatted with editable text.

Some alternative solutions I've seen online using soffice and abiword output a docx with images of each paragraph.

docx pdf file-conversion
posted almost 2 years ago
user card
mcp‭
309 reputation 21 3 58 33
History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

0 comment threads

Post
+5
−0

If your goal is to make small edits to the resulting document, you can use LibreOffice with the following command:

soffice --infilter="writer_pdf_import" --convert-to docx document.pdf

This will produce an editable document, however each text chunk is enclosed in it's own box for positioning, so while small edits are perfectly doable, rewriting whole pages might be a bit painful.

screen capture of making an edit to the docx file

posted almost 2 years ago
2y ago
user card
samcarter‭
131 reputation 0 3 13 7
History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

1 comment thread

Thank you for this. This is not ideal either, because I need to send the docx to native word users. T... (4 comments)
Thank you for this. This is not ideal either, because I need to send the docx to native word users. T...
mcp‭ wrote almost 2 years ago · edited almost 2 years ago
copy link

Thank you for this. This is not ideal either, because I need to send the docx to native word users. They will be taken aback by this but have a surprisingly high tolerance for formatting issues. It's okay for the formatting to get messed up when editing, but I don't think they will accept being confined to a text box for each section.

samcarter‭ wrote almost 2 years ago
copy link

Did you create the pdf from something? Maybe export from there would be easier...

mcp‭ wrote almost 2 years ago · edited almost 2 years ago
copy link

This is a nice thought. I used asciidoctor-pdf. I know I can output to .html natively with asciidoctor.

The other tool I encounter this with is latex.

samcarter‭ wrote almost 2 years ago
copy link

If you can export to html or have the latex source, you can use pandoc to make a much better conversion to word. A pdf file simply does not have enough information to create a useful docx.