Try to select some text by dragging with the mouse. Open the PDF in your default PDF app, such as Edge in Windows 11, Preview in macOS, or Adobe Acrobat Reader (Opens in a new window). If you don’t know whether a PDF was created by an app or by a camera or scanner, here's how to find out. How to Tell if a PDF Is App-Created or Scanned? However, if the PDF was created by scanning or photographing printed text, then the problem is a lot harder, because you need to use OCR (optical character recognition) on the scanned image to extract the text, and that process always risks introducing errors. If the PDF was created from a Windows, Mac, or Linux app by exporting from the app to PDF, then the solution is relatively easy because the text of the PDF is embedded in the PDF file and can be extracted. Which solution you should use depends on the kind of PDF that you need to edit. There’s no perfect solution to this problem, but there are plenty of good-enough solutions.

You have to convert the PDF to a different kind of document first. That kind of editing is simply impossible in a PDF file. Don’t believe any vendor who claims to make PDF editing as easy as it is in Word. What makes it difficult is that the PDF (Portable Document Format) standard, an open standard created by Adobe in the 1990s, is completely incompatible with the DOCX word-processing format that’s now standard in Microsoft Word and almost everything else. The only way to make wholesale edits in a PDF file is to transform it into a word-processing document so that you can edit it in Word, Google Docs, or any other word-processing app. This problem is a lot easier to solve than the first-the answer is at the end of this story.

Here’s another problem: You need to convert a PDF into an image file to display on the web, insert into a document, or upload it to a site that only accepts JPGs. How do you convert the PDF into a document that you can edit to add or remove paragraphs, move text from one part of the document to another, and so on?

Someone sends you a PDF file, and you need to make large-scale changes in it, the kind of wholesale editing that's impossible to do in PDF-editor apps like the ones you might use to do light edits to a PDF.

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How to open pdf as word on mac