Convert a PDF to an HTML web page

To convert a PDF to HTML, select or drop it on this page, press Convert to HTML and download the result: one .html file that opens in any browser and edits in any text editor, with the PDF's pictures inside it. The file keeps your PDF's name, so guide.pdf comes back as guide.html, and the title on the browser tab is that name too.

A PDF is a finished page, and a web page has no pages, so the file cannot simply be saved again. This PDF to HTML converter rebuilds it in two steps on our server: the PDF becomes a Word document, and the Word document is saved as HTML. The words come back as text you can change, which is why the route is graded Very good and not exact: the odd margin, font or line break can move. In our tests:

• Bold and italic stayed, and so did letters such as é, Ø and £.
• Each picture kept all its pixels and was shown at the size it had on the page.
• A page in two columns came back as the left column, then the right one.
• The pages ran on as one long page, with no breaks between them.

How much survives depends on what the PDF holds. A PDF saved from Word, a browser or a design program has real text in it, and that text is rebuilt with its layout. A table comes back as a real HTML table, cell by cell: in one test, a table of four rows and three columns kept all twelve cells, pound signs included. Its borders are less certain. Plain black lines came through, while a table drawn with thin grey lines lost them. The usual ways a PDF table goes wrong are the same as on the way to Word, and why PDF tables break in conversion walks through them.

A scanned PDF is a picture of paper with no text inside. When a PDF has no text at all, our server reads its English words from each page and you get those words alone, each line of the scan as its own paragraph, with no table grid and no pictures. On our scanned test page every word was right apart from one name, where Ø came out as @, and a bracket that was not on the page. Check names and figures before you publish.

The file is a complete page, with a style block at the top. To put it on your own site, open it in a text editor, copy what sits between the opening and closing body tags, and paste that into your site editor's HTML or code view. A PDF to web page conversion leaves four things for you to check first:

• Headings: a heading in the PDF comes back as big bold text, not as a real web heading. Mark it as a heading in your editor, so readers and search engines can follow the page.
• Lists: bullets and numbers arrive as typed characters at the start of each line, not as web lists.
• Repeats: words printed on every page, such as a running header or footer, appear once for each page. Delete the extras.
• Links: a link in the PDF did not come through in our tests, and its words went missing with it. Read the text against the PDF and add the links back by hand.

Still have the file the PDF was made from? Use it instead and skip the rebuild. Convert Word to HTML is one step, and headings and lists made with Word's own styles become real web headings and lists. Notes with no formatting go straight across if you convert text to HTML. Slides take the longest road: convert PowerPoint to HTML goes through a PDF and a Word file on the way.

When the look of the page matters more than editing it, as with a form, a certificate or anything signed, put the PDF itself on your site and link to it. To edit the document rather than publish it, convert PDF to RTF for a file almost any word processor opens. To go the other way and fix a web page as printed pages, convert HTML to PDF.