PDF to Word troubleshooting: scanned files, password errors, and layout differences

PDF to Word runs entirely in your browser — your PDF is never uploaded — so most problems come down to the file itself or to what a structure-based conversion can honestly recover. Here are the common ones and how to fix them.

"This PDF has no text layer — it looks scanned"

Cause: The PDF contains only page images (a scan or photo of a document), so there's no text for the converter to read.

1. Click OCR & convert to Word right in the warning. AttachKit recognizes the text on every page in your browser — nothing is uploaded — showing "Reading page X of Y…" with a progress bar. You can Cancel at any time.
2. The inline OCR reads English. For a scan in another language, open Searchable (OCR) — the warning links there as "Open the OCR tool →" — pick the language, OCR the file, then convert the searchable copy.
3. Spot-check the result. OCR output is a recognition of the page image, not the original text, so check names, numbers and anything critical.

Note: on the OCR path the .docx contains the recognized text only — page images aren't embedded, since a scanned page is itself one big image and embedding it would just duplicate the text visually.

"This PDF is password-protected, so its text can't be read to convert"

Cause: The PDF requires a password to open, so the converter can't read its pages.

1. Open Unlock — the error links there as "Remove the password first →".
2. Enter the PDF's password to produce an unlocked copy. That also happens locally; the password and file stay on your device.
3. Bring the unlocked copy back to PDF to Word and convert it.

"OCR didn't find any readable text on this PDF"

Cause: OCR ran but recognized nothing usable — typically a very low-quality or skewed scan, handwriting (which OCR generally can't read), blank pages, or text in a language the inline English OCR doesn't recognize.

1. For non-English documents, use Searchable (OCR) and choose the right language.
2. If the scan is poor, re-scan at a higher resolution (300 DPI or better, straight and well-lit) and try again.
3. Handwritten documents are out of scope for OCR — there's no reliable fix for those.

"Couldn't OCR and convert this PDF to Word"

Cause: The OCR run itself failed. The most common trigger is a very long scan — the on-device OCR engine caps at 200 pages — or the browser running out of memory mid-run.

1. Split the document first with Pages and convert the parts separately.
2. Close other heavy tabs to free memory, especially on phones and low-RAM machines, then retry.

The Word file doesn't look like the original PDF

Cause: This is the conversion's honest scope, not a bug. It reconstructs structure — paragraphs in reading order, headings, bold/italic, tables, links, images, alignment — from the text layer. Exact fonts and complex multi-column layout aren't reproduced; reproducing them pixel-perfectly would need a server-side rendering engine, and AttachKit doesn't upload your file.

1. If a bordered table came through as plain text, the table's borders may be drawn as images rather than vector lines — bordered (ruled) tables convert best.
2. On pages that mix text with figures or tables, content is placed top-to-bottom; multi-column reading order is preserved on pure-text pages.
3. If what you actually need is the exact appearance rather than editable text, keep the PDF or export pages as images with PDF to JPG/PNG.

The .docx file is much bigger than the PDF

Cause: You converted with Best quality, which embeds recovered images as lossless PNG.

1. Click Convert another, reload the file, switch the image quality back to Smaller file (compressed JPEG images) — the tool keeps whichever option you last picked — and convert again.

"Couldn't convert this PDF to Word — it may be corrupted or in an unsupported format"

Cause: The file couldn't be parsed as a usable PDF. It may be damaged, truncated by a bad download or email transfer, or not really a PDF (e.g. a renamed image or Word file).

1. Confirm the file opens in another PDF viewer. If it doesn't open anywhere, re-download or re-export it from the source.
2. If it's an image rather than a PDF, convert it first with JPG to PDF.
3. If the file opens fine elsewhere but still fails here, report it — that's a case the team wants to see.

Still stuck?

If none of these match what you're seeing, contact support and describe what happened — since your file never leaves your browser, support can't see it, so include the file's size, page count, and whether it's a scan.