There is a fairly laborious way to convert some PDFs to Word. However, the text will absolutely have to be reformatted (and possibly even re-entered). You also have to deal with matching the fonts of the original PDF’s text, if that is a priority. Lastly, if the PDF has text running across photos or other inconsistent backgrounds, or if the text runs in any direction but straight up-and-down like a newspaper, then you are basically out of luck. If the PDF text runs only over white or solid-colored background, and is oriented straight up-and-down, then you are in business.
First off, a PDF can be opened in Adobe Photoshop as a TIFF file (or opened in Adobe Illustrator as a native Illustrator file). In Photoshop, you’ll choose the resolution before the file opens – if this is something that has to be printed (whether from a printing press or an office printer) later, you need to choose a fairly high dpi (at minumum 300 dpi).
The PDF text will be a part of the TIFF file, and will be completely uneditable. If you need to modify the text in any way, you will have to erase all the areas with text from within Photoshop (assuming consistent background behind the text). With text over a white background, you would “paint over” the text in white. With text over a solid colored background, you would use the Eyedropper tool to select the background color, then “paint over” the text in the background color.
What you are left with is a page-size TIFF containing all of the PDF’s graphic elements, and none of the PDF’s text. You can bring this TIFF into Word, and then enter in all of the text over the TIFF. This would be world’s easier to perform in Quark Xpress, Pagemaker, or maybe even MS Publisher … bbut if Word is what you’ve got, it’s what you’ve got.
Often, you can copy and paste text from a PDF. This is not invariably true, IIRC, but true often enough. So it’s likely you won’t have to re-type all the text from the PDF. You will have to hope that the kind of formatting you need to do to the text can be performed in Word. If it’s straight up-and-down text aas you’d see in a newspaper or textbook, then you can probably manage. Word can do columns … not sure about columns of different widths. Also not sure if Word has any kind of a text-box feature, which would be needed for things like photo captions inset into the main body of text. The original PDF really has to have simple formatting for this to work using Word.
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Guy Incognito, if I may ask: why do your Publishing folks want to convert from PDF to Word? If they need a PDF modified, it would be easier to ask the party that created the PDF to re-create the PDF with the changes you guys need. A PDF is meant to essentially be an immutable end product. Perhaps you guys need to ask for different kinds of files from the other end. You really don’t want to get too involved in re-creating docs from PDFs (especially in Word!) if there is any reasonable way around it.