hushvertScanned PDF to Word
To turn a scanned PDF into an editable Word document, drop the .pdf above and start the conversion; every page is read with optical character recognition and the recognized text arrives as a .docx you can edit. This is the lane for pages that are pictures of text: paper you put through a scanner, a fax, or a photo taken with a phone. If you can already select text in your PDF you do not need this page at all, and the free PDF to Word converter will do a better job. Recognition supports English and Hebrew today, and it is a paid conversion because reading images of text costs real server time.
Encrypted upload on an EU server, deleted within about an hour.
Drop your PDF hereChoose a PDF to convert
It becomes a DOCX right in your browser, up to 50 MB
Limits, published exactly
| Where it runs | On our server, over an encrypted connection; deleted within about an hour. |
|---|---|
| Free conversions | 2 per day without an account, 5 per day with a free account. |
| Max file size, free | 50 MB |
Why convert Scanned PDF to Word?
A scan is a photograph of a document, so nothing inside it is text as far as software is concerned: you cannot search it, copy a paragraph out of it, or fix a typo. Recognition turns those pixels back into words, which is the difference between retyping a ten-page agreement and editing it. This is the usual answer for archived paperwork, documents that came back from a lawyer or a government office as scans, and anything that arrived by fax and now needs to be quoted, amended or filed onward.
What is PDF?
PDF (Portable Document Format) is the 1993 Adobe format that froze documents into a fixed, device-independent layout, and it has since become the legal and professional standard for anything that must look the same everywhere: contracts, invoices, forms, papers. A PDF can contain vector text, images, fonts and annotations. Editing one is famously awkward, which is exactly the point; it is a final-form format.
What is DOCX?
DOCX is Microsoft Word's default document format since Word 2007: technically a ZIP container full of XML describing text, styles, tables and embedded media. Nearly every word processor can read it, but viewing one without Office installed, or on a locked-down machine, is still a recurring annoyance. Because it is structured markup rather than fixed layout, faithful conversion is about content and structure, not pixel-perfect appearance.
Quality and what to expect
What you get is the text of the document in reading order, not a rebuilt copy of its layout. On our test corpus, clean scans of ordinary prose recovered all of their words at every scan quality we tried, including a slightly skewed phone photo, and a clean scan of a bordered table recovered nearly everything. Hebrew is a first-class case and keeps proper reading order, including sentences that mix Hebrew with English words, numbers and dates; vowel-pointed text is the exception and comes back unreliably. Two limits are worth knowing before you pay. Tables of numbers photographed with a phone are the weakest case in our testing, because recognition skips figures it cannot read rather than guessing at them. And recognition currently covers English and Hebrew only: a document in another language is refused and your credits are returned automatically rather than handing you nonsense. Headings, columns and images are not reproduced; you get clean editable paragraphs. On privacy, this is a server conversion by necessity: the upload is encrypted, the scan is deleted immediately after conversion and the Word file within about an hour.
Scanned PDF to Word FAQ
How is this different from the regular PDF to Word converter?
The regular converter extracts text that is already inside the file, which is free and more faithful because nothing has to be guessed. This page reads pictures of text instead, which is the only option when a PDF has no text layer. The quick test: try selecting text in your PDF. If the cursor selects words, use the free converter; if it selects a picture, you need this one.
Which languages does the recognition support?
English and Hebrew, including documents that mix the two. Anything else is refused rather than converted badly, and the credits are returned automatically. More languages are added based on what people actually ask for, so tell us if yours is missing.
What does it cost, and what if the result is unusable?
It costs 5 credits per document, and it is included in the week pass and Pro. If recognition cannot read the scan reliably the job fails and the credits go back to your balance automatically, without you asking. If a conversion technically succeeds but the result is not usable, the re-credit link on the account page covers that case once.
How many pages can I convert at once?
Up to 50 pages per document. Recognition is per page work, so a long document is genuinely slower and more expensive to run than a short one; splitting a big file and converting the parts is the way around the limit.
Will the Word file keep the original layout?
No, and it is better to know that up front. You get the words in reading order as editable paragraphs, not a reconstruction of columns, headers or table borders. For a document whose text you need to edit or quote this is what matters; for one whose exact appearance you need, keep the PDF.