Extracting text from a PDF in the browser sounds straightforward. It is — mostly. The tricky part is dealing with the quirks that real-world PDFs bring: overlapping text, missing spaces, invisible glyphs, and layout that defies the reading order.
This post walks through a minimal but production-ready PDF-to-Word converter built with Vue 3 and PDF.js.
Why client-side?
Traditional PDF-to-Word converters upload your file, process it on a server, and send back a .docx. That works, but it introduces latency, bandwidth costs, and privacy risk. A browser-based extractor:
Keeps files on the user's device
