The PDF looks clear and lets you select words, yet pasting produces different characters. Test the actual copied text before converting the whole document. Correct appearance and correct extraction are separate checks.
Why appearance and copying differ
Adobe's PDF Reference distinguishes drawing glyphs from identifying characters for searching and export. Some fonts need additional mapping information, such as ToUnicode, to associate codes with Unicode characters.
Visible words can therefore look correct while extraction information is insufficient or incorrect. Treat this as one possible explanation to investigate, not a diagnosis of every affected file.
Start with a short passage
We recommend copying a sentence you can read into a plain-text editor. Compare words, names and numbers, then repeat on another page or font to establish the scope.
| Observation | Our suggested next step |
|---|---|
| Correct characters, wrong sequence | Review columns and reading order |
| Wrong characters immediately after copying | Request the source or a fresh PDF export |
| No selectable text | Check whether the page is a scan |
| Only particular passages fail | Record pages and locations for review |
Changing a font in Word does not automatically repair character information in the source PDF.
Choose the appropriate route
FileMyLove's PDF to Word builds a document from extracted PDF text. It has no dedicated ToUnicode repair control. Repeating conversion does not guarantee recovery of correct words.
Without a source document, we suggest trying PDF to images for an affected page, then Image to text. Proofread every word against the original. This recognizes text anew from an image; it does not repair the original character map or guarantee accuracy.
Do not assume adding OCR to the PDF removes incorrect existing text. The site's PDF OCR adds recognized text over original pages rather than replacing faulty font mappings.
Check the delivery copy
Keep the original alongside the corrected copy. Inspect names, amounts, dates and words that change meaning. If characters are correct but paragraphs alternate, see PDF column reading order separately.
Conversion and OCR run in the browser without uploading files. Test a short page before processing a long document.
