How to convert PDF to docx
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.
2 answers
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.
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The following users marked this post as Works for me:
User | Comment | Date |
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mcp | (no comment) | Jan 17, 2023 at 00:40 |
Pdf is one of the most unsuitable file formats to use as a starting point for converting it to docx. A pdf by itself is pretty much "dumb", it knows the position of letters etc, but not much more.
You want to take a step further up in your workflow to where your pdf came from. If you have the latex sources or if you can export your document into another file format like html, then you still have all the knowledge about the document structure.
You can then use pandoc to convert to docx. For example from latex to docx:
pandoc -s document.tex -o test.docx
which will result in an editable docx with headlines and everything:
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