Check out this link: http://www.pdftoword.com/ (thanks to a tweet from @perrybelcher). I haven’t checked out this online conversion service myself as I did in the other posts. But the results posted in another blog look astounding.
Here is what the authors say about their service:
“While it’s not possible to replicate the exact formatting and appearance of the original file used in creating a PDF, we believe our free PDF-to-Word converter produces more accurate results than any other tool out there, including the most expensive desktop products…”
“When you need to quickly re-purpose PDF content in Word, it must also be well formatted. Unlike most PDF-to-Word converters, we use the full range of formatting and layout tools available — including paragraphs, columns, tables, and margins — making pages much easier to edit and manipulate…”
“Pictures, photos, vector images, and Excel charts are all examples of graphical elements that might be contained within PDF files.
Our PDF-to-Word converter is designed to convert and accurately re-position all of these upon conversion. Even for complex drawings and shapes with textures, patterns, and fills, we replicate the images, while maintaining editing capabilities.”
The two examples shown in the blog - an IRS form and a poster including text and graphics - make this a pretty outstanding service considering that the forms were scanned (but not OCR’d, at least no mention of OCR was made in the blog). And what’s best, the service is free.