PDF to Word, on your own machine
Pull the text out of a PDF into an editable Word document — headings, paragraphs, lists and bold runs intact — without the file leaving your computer.
What comes across, and what does not
The converter reads the text layer of the PDF, groups the characters back into lines, and infers structure from font size and weight: a 20-point line becomes a heading, an 11-point line becomes body text. That gives you a document you can edit, quote and re-style.
It does not attempt to reproduce the original layout. Columns become single-column paragraphs, tables become text, absolute positioning is dropped. This is a text conversion, not a facsimile — the right tool for quoting a judgment, not for recreating a letterhead.
The scan problem, stated plainly
If a PDF was produced by a scanner, it contains pictures of words rather than words. There is no text layer to extract, and no amount of conversion will invent one.
Slate detects this and stops with a message telling you the document looks like a scan, instead of handing back an empty Word file that looks like a bug. Scanned documents need OCR first; that is a separate job and this tool does not pretend otherwise.
Good candidates for conversion
Judgments and tribunal decisions downloaded as PDF, published reports, invoices from suppliers, terms and conditions, anything you need to quote in a letter or a draft. Convert once, then work in Word with tracked changes and comments as usual.
Will the formatting match the original?+
Headings, paragraphs, lists and bold/italic carry over. Columns, tables and text boxes do not — they are flattened to plain paragraphs.
How do I know if my PDF is a scan?+
Try to select the text in a PDF reader. If nothing highlights, it is a scan and this tool will stop with that message.
Is the file uploaded?+
No. Extraction and the .docx build both happen in the browser tab.
Files are processed in the browser tab and are never uploaded. Slate is not legal advice or a case management system.