PDF to Word Formatting Problems: 7 Common Issues and How to Fix Them

This guide is organised by symptom, so jump to the one you have. Each entry covers three things: why it happens, how Convertube's PDF to Word converter handles it, and how to fix it by hand in Word if your file is already converted.

Convertube is a free online converter with one big difference from most: your file is never uploaded. Conversion runs in your own browser — no sign-up and no daily limit.

Why PDF to Word conversion breaks formatting

A PDF is like a photograph of a page: every character and line is pinned to fixed coordinates. A Word document flows — text reflows as margins and font sizes change. Turning one into the other means inferring the structure back out of those coordinates:

• Which characters form one paragraph, and which line is a heading
• Which lines and words together make a table
• Which lines are a chart and which are just a divider
• Whether the page is one column or two, and which side to read first

None of that is stored in the PDF. Get one guess wrong and you get one of the problems below.

7 common formatting problems and how to fix them

1. A chart turned into a pile of loose numbers

Why: A bar or line chart in a PDF is not an image — it is a set of drawing instructions, while its axis numbers and legend are ordinary text. Many converters miss the drawing and keep only the text, so the chart disappears and its numbers scatter across the page.

How Convertube handles it: It examines each page twice — once for dense ink (logos, seals, barcodes), and once specifically for areas that have ink but produced nothing. Sparse charts are caught by the second pass and put back as a picture, axis labels included, in their original position.

Fix it in Word: Delete the stray numbers, take a screenshot of the chart from the PDF, and use Insert → Pictures to put it back.

2. A picture sits on top of the text, or moved somewhere else

Why: Word can place a picture three ways: inline with the text (pushes everything down, so the document gets longer), in front of the text (covers the words underneath), or with text wrapping around it. Many converters use one of the first two.

How Convertube handles it: A figure that fills its column goes into the flow of that column, taking the height it took on the page, so it can never land on words. A picture the page set text beside keeps its position and the text wraps around it. Stamps, signatures and watermarks the page printed text through stay over the text, and a badge out in the margin stays in the margin.

Fix it in Word: Select the picture → Layout Options icon → choose "Square" or "Top and Bottom" wrapping, then drag it back into place.

3. The same chart appears twice

Why: The converter captured the chart's drawing, but the axis titles, legend and tick numbers around its edge were kept as body text too — so the same content appears once in the picture and once beside it.

How Convertube handles it: The captured area is widened to take in labels hanging off its edge, and those labels are removed from the text. The caption below ("Figure 2 …") is never taken — it stays as editable, searchable text.

Fix it in Word: Delete the short duplicated text next to the picture.

4. A table became plain text, or rows and columns are misaligned

Why: A table in a PDF is often just lines plus neatly aligned text, not a real table object. The converter has to infer rows and columns from lines and alignment.

How Convertube handles it: Ruled tables are rebuilt from their lines; text aligned in columns without any lines is recognised as a table too. Merged cells, cell shading, and the empty boxes on a form (left for someone to fill in) all keep their grid and height. A table of contents keeps its dotted leaders with the page numbers aligned to the right margin.

Fix it in Word: Select the lines that became plain text → Insert → Table → Convert Text to Table, with tabs or spaces as the separator.

5. Two-column text got jumbled together

Why: Papers and journals often use two columns. If the converter does not see the columns, it joins the left and right line at the same height into one, and the text stops making sense.

How Convertube handles it: It finds the gap between the columns once for the whole page and checks that both sides really hold paragraphs, then reads the page band by band — left column first, right column second — with headings, figures and tables that span both columns kept whole. The output is set in real Word columns, so it reflows like the original.

Fix it in Word: Select the affected text → Layout → Columns → Two, then check the order paragraph by paragraph.

6. Fonts changed, or text is garbled

Why: Either the PDF's font was not embedded or is not on your computer, so Word substitutes another; or the PDF is a scan and contains no text at all, only images.

How Convertube handles it: Fonts are written by their original name — if you have the font it displays as-is, otherwise Word substitutes one; the layout shifts slightly but the text is complete. Scans are run through OCR text recognition first, also on your own machine.

Fix it in Word: Press Ctrl+A and set one common font for the whole document.

7. More pages than the original, or pages with only a few lines

Why: Usually pictures were placed inline and took up extra height, or large blank areas in the PDF were copied as page breaks.

How Convertube handles it: Pictures take only the height they took on the page, large gaps are treated as section breaks rather than copied, and page numbers go into the Word footer instead of the body, where one line of overflow used to push them onto a page of their own. On our test documents, a 7-page two-column paper converts to 7 pages.

Fix it in Word: Press Ctrl+Shift+8 to show formatting marks, find the stray page breaks or empty paragraphs, and delete them.

Scanned PDFs need text recognition first

If your PDF came from a scanner or a phone camera, every page is an image with no text you can copy. These files need OCR (optical character recognition) first. Convertube detects scans before converting and recognises the text on your machine before building the Word file. The result is the text, not the original layout, and accuracy depends on the scan quality.

What still does not convert well

• Math formulas: A formula set on its own line comes out as a picture of the formula, so it looks right but is not an editable equation. Math inside a sentence stays text and may lose its sub- and superscript positions.
• Fonts you do not have: Word substitutes another font, and a substitute that is wider than the original makes paragraphs a little longer — the page count can drift by a page.
• Tables wider than the page: these are reported rather than forced into a screenshot — a screenshot looks right, but dozens of rows become impossible to select, search or edit.

Local conversion vs uploading to a cloud converter

Check these three things after converting

1. Pages with charts: the chart should be a picture, not scattered numbers
2. No picture lying across a paragraph
3. Page count close to the original, with no page holding two or three lines