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Is there any free software available on Ubuntu that can convert a pdf file to a .doc file?

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  • I think the current accepted answer is not the right one because it does not work. Abiword works!
    – Léo Léopold Hertz 준영
    Nov 20, 2016 at 16:40

5 Answers 5

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Download Abiword from Ubuntu Software Center or you can install it by typing following command in terminal:

sudo apt-get install abiword

Then perform the conversion:

abiword --to=doc example.pdf
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openoffice (or alternatively the libreoffice fork) both have pdf import plugins and .doc export functionality... though both aspects suffer from conversion issues AFAIK. By this I mean that the conversion fidelity isn't always 100%.

Abiword also works in a similar way, if OpenOffice doesn't work on your system.

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    libreoffice --invisible --convert-to docx:"MS Word 2007 XML" file.pdf When I convert pdf to docx/doc it says "convert /home/file.pdf -> /home/file.docx using filter : MS Word 2007 XML, Error: Please verify input parameters... (SfxBaseModel::impl_store <file:///home/file.docx> failed: 0xc10)"
    – mohit
    Aug 12, 2016 at 19:44
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    @mohit Your proposal does not work in Debian 8.5.
    – Léo Léopold Hertz 준영
    Nov 20, 2016 at 16:15
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I've had great success with PDF to Word online. This is not a desktop application, but a service, that works better than other things I've used.

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  • thank you :) ive come across this before.but i was looking for a desktop software.this is not very accurate.
    – Vijay
    Apr 28, 2011 at 18:51
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    Please also make sure to check out the privacy policy of this service before uploading any personal documents.
    – Glutanimate
    Apr 7, 2013 at 20:14
  • @neo did you happen to find a more accurate service/tool?
    – Alex
    Nov 16, 2015 at 9:34
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    I tried it on 2018-10-25. The formatting is not perfect; bullets were lost, indentation was wrong (probably because of the bullets gone). Still, worth a try. Maybe with a simpler PDF file, it would come out better. However, I found this online service that did a very good job with very few formatting errors: pdf2docx.com
    – Hans Deragon
    Oct 26, 2018 at 1:43
  • I just downloaded the AbiWord for my windows machine. It is similar to MSWord. Now can anyone please tell me how can I convert PDF to DOC using this?
    – rahim.nagori
    Oct 30, 2020 at 13:04
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Install AbiWord from Ubuntu Software Center

Open Pdf Files with it.

Use Save As.. to save pdf in Word Doc format.

Its this easy :)

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I prefer converting PDF files first to HTML using pdftohtml included in the poppler-utils package, for example by means of a file manager context menu script merely consisting of this command:

pdftohtml -noframes -q -p -c "$1" "${1%\.pdf}-img.html"

Then I open the resulting HTML file in LibreOffice Writer, and (after a little editing) Save As any other document format I like.

Note: Adding -i parameter to the command above produces HTML file without images.

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    @HomunculusReticulli Please try it with several different PDF files before passing such a verdict ;-) Probably the PDF file you tried doesn't actually include any text other than images, in which case only some OCR recognition software would be helpful.
    – Sadi
    Jul 21, 2016 at 16:53
  • It worked for me. Abiword returned me a failed doc. Convert it to html and then to word will work on any case. If pdf is an image, of course only an OCR is required :/
    – JRichardsz
    Nov 12, 2022 at 15:32

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