Using PDF as background of Word document

Question

Original problem: I have a PDF document with me which I wish to comment on. However, I have yet to find a PDF editor that has the versatility of text boxes, comments and equation editors etc. as Microsoft Word itself.

As such, I thought of the idea of using the PDF document as a background to a word document, of which I can comment flexibly as much as I want. However, I have yet to find such a function on Word online. How can I go about doing this?

A little more details: I am not interested and having to edit the PDF itself, and I do not even need the final document (after commenting on Word) to detect texts from the original PDFs. In other words, I'm happy with the PDF just being a picture in the Word document. A possible solution will be to convert every page of PDF into a picture file, then manually add into Word as background/picture, but given that the document is >100 pages, I seek a less tedious solution.

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Remark: I also welcome comments which suggest an alternative solution to my original problem.

Answer 1

Here's a possible workaround

• Export all the pages in the PDF file to PNG with some tools like PDFCreator or PDF-XChange. Some more suggestions can be found in How to convert a multi-page PDF file to PNG files, with one PNG file per page of the PDF document?
• Create a new blank document in Word
  • Set all margins to 0 by going to Layout > Margins > Custom Margins and set the top/left/bottom/right margin values
  • Set the page rotation to match the original PDF file (portrait or landscape)
• Select all the exported images then drag and drop onto the Word document. Alternatively select Insert > Pictures and insert all pictures

Now you already have the desired document. Unfortunately Word doesn't allow you to comment on a picture or at random positions in the page. Therefore you need to create a frame and type texts on it. This way you can also select texts in the frame and create a new comment for it. See How can I add a comment in word in a text box?

Answer 2

I just convinced Word to use a full-page PDF as a background:

1.) File -> Open, choose the PDF file
2.) Word says it will convert it into a Word file, accept this
3.) In my case, the PDF was A4 size, 1 page - and I got a docx file in A4 size with the PDF as a full-page image.
4.) Select the image, cut-and-paste it into the header or footer of the word document, and re-adjust the position (page, 0cm, page, 0cm)

Voila: The word file has the pdf as a background, and you can draw text boxes on top of it, or whatever Word lets you do in a document.

Answer 3

Manually converting a 100-page PDF file into a picture is a very time-consuming process.

As far as I know, there is no particularly suitable OOTB method to complete this step.

I actually recommend that you use some third-party tools to convert PDF files into pictures in bulk or directly into word files.

Answer 4

The best solution is to use Adobe Acrobat DC which can export the PDF to images and even as a Word Document itself. Of course it's not free but you could grab a trial version.

See also: How to convert PDF files to Word Documents