What you should know
A digital document answers two opposite needs: being editable while it is written, then fixed for distribution. Word-processing formats — DOCX, Markdown — serve the first; PDF and EPUB the second.
The natural chain is therefore to write in an editable format, then export to a reading format. The frequent mistake is trying to go backwards: rebuilding a DOCX from a PDF is always approximate.
Strengths
- Comfortable editing formats, with styles and revisions
- Faithful distribution formats, identical on every device
- Text stays selectable and searchable in modern formats
- Images and Excel workbooks become readable PDFs in one click
Limitations to know
- A PDF is not designed to be retouched
- A scanned document contains no text without OCR
- Layout varies from one word processor to another
- Conversions from PDF lose the logical structure
When to use it
Write in DOCX or Markdown, distribute in PDF. Reserve EPUB for books and long texts. TXT serves only extraction or raw text exchange.
Quality, size and compatibility
In FileXvert, an image becomes a PDF without recompression and an Excel workbook a readable table; Word, PowerPoint and HTML become faithful PDFs and a PDF becomes a Word document, an Excel workbook or a PDF/A, thanks to our server, after a notice shown before upload. A Markdown file becomes a text PDF. From a PDF, text extraction is faithful on a native document and empty on a scan, since there is no OCR. Always check accented characters and tables after conversion.
Frequently asked questions
- Which format to send a document?
- PDF, because it fixes the layout and opens the same way everywhere. DOCX suits a proofread that must remain editable.
- How do I extract text from a PDF?
- Conversion to TXT is enough for a native PDF. For a scan, optical character recognition is needed, followed by proofreading: errors are frequent.