Convert a PDF to an ODT document you can edit

To convert PDF to ODT, drop the PDF anywhere on this page or press Select PDF file, then press Convert to ODT. You download an OpenDocument text file with the same name (budget.pdf becomes budget.odt), ready to open in LibreOffice Writer or any other program that reads .odt files.

A PDF fixes every line in place and has no paragraphs to type into, so this PDF to ODT converter works the document out again in two steps. First our server rebuilds the pages as an editable Word file, deciding which words make a paragraph, which make a table and where each picture belongs. That file is then saved as OpenDocument. Because the layout is rebuilt, not copied, the route is graded Very good: a margin, font or line break can shift.

We converted test PDFs here and unzipped every ODT to see what arrived. From a PDF with real text:

• Tables came back as ODT tables to edit cell by cell: one of four rows and three columns kept all twelve cells.
• Bold, italic and letters such as é, Ø and £ stayed as they were.
• Photos were stored inside the .odt with every pixel, at the size they had on the page.
• Each PDF page started a new page, and paper sizes held: US Letter stayed US Letter, landscape A4 stayed landscape.

Plan some tidying in Writer. Headings arrive as large bold text with no heading style, so a contents list will not find them. Bullets and numbers are typed characters, not a real list. A running header or footer becomes ordinary lines on every page. Links were lost in our tests, together with the words they sat on. Columns fared worst: in a one-page newsletter, the left column's text was spread over two columns on its own, and the right column's text moved to a second page at full width.

Scanned pages are photographs of paper, with no text in them. When nothing in the PDF is text, the first step reads the English words from the page, and the ODT holds plain paragraphs, one for each printed line. In our scan the only slips were Ø read as @ and one bracket that was never on the paper.

Send what was asked for. ODT is the right file when a council, a university or a colleague on LibreOffice wants an .odt; our guide to what an ODT file is for explains why some offices insist on it. For a reader on Microsoft Word, convert PDF to Word: one step, with no second save on top.

Still have the Word file the PDF was made from? Convert Word to ODT and nothing has to be rebuilt: it is one step, graded Exact. Once your edits are done, convert ODT to PDF to send a fixed copy again. If the words are headed for a website rather than a word processor, convert PDF to HTML.