Last reviewed: 2026-10-25
You convert a PDF, open it, and the lines break in odd places, the text sits in half the page or the font is not the one you expected. None of this is random. Here is what causes each problem and how to fix it in a minute or two.
A Word document knows that something is a paragraph, a heading or a table. A PDF does not: it records which letter goes at which position on the page, in which font. A converter has to rebuild the structure from those positions, which is always a best guess. Microsoft says the same about its own PDF import in Word: the converted document “might not have a perfect page-to-page correspondence with the original”.
What you see: paragraphs where every line ends early, often with big gaps between words if the text is justified. This happened to our two-column test article: 35 manual line breaks across 8 paragraphs.
Why: the converter kept the PDF’s line endings as manual line breaks instead of letting Word wrap the text.
Fix: select the affected paragraphs, open Replace (Ctrl+H), put ^l (a lowercase L) in “Find what” and a single space in “Replace with”, then Replace All. If you prefer menus, the Special button in the Replace dialog lists “Manual Line Break”. The codes are case-sensitive.
What you see: a former two-column page now runs as a single column down the left half of the page.
Why: the converter put the columns one after the other (in our test the reading order was correct, left column then right) but kept a large right indent, about 3.5 inches, to imitate the column width.
Fix: select the text, open Paragraph settings and set the right indent to 0. If you want two columns back, use Layout → Columns → Two afterwards, which gives you real Word columns that reflow when you edit.
What you see: the text appears in a font other than the original, and lines or pages break in different places.
Why: the Word file asks for the font the PDF used (in our tests: Liberation Serif, DejaVu Sans and Charis SIL, depending on the file). If that font is not installed on your computer, Word shows a substitute. Microsoft describes the same behaviour in Word for iPad: a missing font is replaced by an available one, which changes the look but not the file.
Fix: either install the original font, or select all (Ctrl+A) and choose a font you have. In Word for Windows, File → Options → Advanced → Font Substitution shows which fonts are missing and lets you map them permanently.
What you see: clicking on text selects a box; editing one line does not push the next line down.
Why: the converter fell back to its second engine, LibreOffice, which places text in positioned frames. Our converter only uses it when the main engine fails or loses more than half the text.
Fix: for a short document, copy the text out of the boxes into a new document. For a long one, try saving the PDF again from its source program (or printing it to a new PDF), then converting again.
What you see: “ΑΙΤΗΣΗΓΙΑ” instead of “ΑΙΤΗΣΗ ΓΙΑ”. Some PDFs store each word separately without the space between them. Our converter detects runs of 28 or more letters with no space and inserts the missing spaces before you see the file. If you still find a glued pair, it is worth sending us the file details.
Convert a PDF now → Free, no sign-up, files deleted as soon as you download the resultSelect the text, press Ctrl+H, enter ^l (lowercase L) in Find what and a space in Replace with, then choose Replace All.
The Word file asks for the font used in the PDF. If it is not installed on your computer, Word substitutes another font, which can also move line and page breaks.