Why is my PDF not converting to Word correctly? A mess-up in formatting always appears after converting PDF to Word! Missing fonts, messy layouts, text turned into images, unrecognizable pictures, and disappeared or incorrectly merged table borders.
All of these are because PDF is an unstructured document. Unlike Word, it stores content as separate characters, lines, and images instead of clear structures like paragraphs, headings, or tables. However, most tools can only guess the text layout to achieve conversion, leading to unavoidable formatting errors.
This blog will explain the core reasons for PDF conversion formatting issues. Provides practical solutions for more accurate and higher-quality conversion.
Deep Analysis: Why Converting PDF to Word Messes Up Formatting
1. Page Description Language Features
PDF is based on the PostScript page description language to ensure consistent visual presentation on different devices, rather than being stored as editable text. Unlike Word, PDF uses vector graphics, embedded fonts, bitmap images, and object coordinates to represent pages, instead of text flows like Word.
These layout elements must be interpreted during the PDF conversion process, but this process often has difficulty in perfectly restoring the original text structure, resulting in formatting issues.
2. Complexity of Internal Data Structure
As we all know, PDF files consist of multiple objects, such as text, images, tables, and paths, which are stored using XObject, streams, and dictionaries.
However, these data are not always arranged in a logical reading order but based on visual presentation. Therefore, PDF to Word always messes up the formatting, such as text misplacement, missing, or overlapping.
3. Font and Character Encoding Issues
PDF supports various font embedding methods, including full, partial, and external font references. Therefore, the target format can't find the relevant font during the conversion process if non-embedded fonts are used in PDF. This leads to many format issues, such as font substitution, character spacing variations, or garbled text.
Additionally, use custom character encoding (e.g., Type 3 Fonts) inside the PDF. These encoding methods are not compatible with standard Unicode or ASCII, which may cause the text can't be recognized during PDF to Word processing, resulting in further formatting issues.
4. Differences in Page Layout Structure and Text Wrapping Logic
Why does PDF not convert to Word correctly? Because the PDF does not store text flow like Word, but uses absolute coordinate text positioning. In other words, every text block of PDF is independently placed on the page, not a continuous text flow. This results in layout issues in the converted document, such as incorrect paragraph spacing, inconsistent alignment, and other formatting errors.
5. Parsing of Images and Vector Objects
Some text may be stored as vector graphics or raster images (such as scanned PDFs). In this case, ordinary text extraction methods cannot recognize these contents and need to be converted with the help of OCR (optical character recognition) technology. However, OCR recognition may be affected by fonts, noise, scanning quality, etc., resulting in character conversion errors, which leads to converting PDF to Word with messed-up formatting.
6. Challenges in Table Structure Parsing
You need to know that PDF does not have a native table structure but only simulates the table through a combination of text and rows. When converting PDF to Word, the row and column information of the table may be lost or misidentified.
7. Impact of PDF Security Mechanisms
Some PDF files may be encrypted or have restricted permissions, resulting in the conversion tool being unable to correctly extract text.
8. Limitations of Conversion Tool Algorithms
Different PDF to Word conversion tools use different parsing conversion algorithms, resulting in large differences in conversion quality. For example, some tools use coordinate-based text extraction, which may not be able to correctly restore the text flow. Some tools rely on AI or pattern matching for parsing, which may lead to misidentification.
Generally speaking, PDF not being converted to Word correctly is mainly affected by multiple technical factors such as its underlying storage structure, font encoding, text typesetting, table parsing, and OCR recognition.
Solution for Converting PDF to Word While Preserving Formatting
ComPDFKit’s latest PDF Conversion SDK solutions are introduced by AI table recognition and layout analysis technologies. Combined with our self-developed natural reading order and layout restoration algorithm, it accurately restores reading order and page layout, solving the PDF conversion formatting issues.
ComPDF Conversion solution can accurately recognize over 30 types of PDF elements and supports the accurate conversion of complex documents such as two-column, three-column, merged cells, and borderless tables. In the latest solution, ComPDFKit achieves faster conversion speed, and smaller file size, while keeping high-quality PDF conversions. Help users say goodbye to messy formatting issues!
Final Words
In a short word, the fixed layout of PDF and missed structure information, make it hard for PDF converting to Word correctly. ComPDF, a leading PDF solution provider, leverages top AI technologies and a self-developed natural reading order and layout restoration algorithm to precisely solve the converting PDF to Word formatting issues.
Ready to experience seamless PDF conversion? Free to contact us to learn more details or technical consultation!