Retype or convert a PDF? The honest time math

The rule of thumb

• Under about 200 words, or a table of a few rows: retype, or copy and paste. It is 4 minutes of typing, and there is nothing to clean up.
• Over a page of 1-column text: convert. The time saved grows with every page.
• A designed page (2 columns, text boxes, a poster): neither, quite. Take the text out and lay it out again in the destination.

Those lines come from 2 numbers you can check yourself.

The cost of retyping: words, divided by speed

Typing speed varies a lot, so measure yours if you can. The largest study we know, “Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes” by Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta (Aalto University and the University of Cambridge, CHI 2018, checked on 11 October 2026), measured 168,000 volunteers copying sentences in an online test. The average was 52 words a minute, the University of Cambridge reported on 5 April 2018; speeds varied widely, and the fastest reached about 120.

Copying sentences from a screen in a test is the easy case. Retyping a document adds looking back and forth at the page, formatting and proofreading, so treat 52 as the best case for an average typist.

The cost of converting: the checking, not the conversion

The conversion itself is quick. With getPDF’s PDF to Word, a 48-page test report took about 0.8 seconds on a laptop, and a 2-page lease about 20 milliseconds. The real cost is what you check afterwards, and that depends on the document:

• Plain report or letter: look at the headings in Word’s navigation pane, scroll through the tables, delete page breaks if you do not want them. Why the converted file looks different lists the fixes.
• Contract: clause numbers such as 4.2.1 or (a) come through as printed, each as the number, a tab and a hanging indent, not as a Word list that renumbers itself. So check the wording and the layout rather than the numbering; if you add a clause, you number it by hand. The contract guide has the 10-minute pass.
• Tables of numbers: for spreadsheets, PDF to Excel keeps amounts as numbers; check the total once against the printed one.

4 cases, worked through

Word counts are from Word’s own counter on the converted file; retyping times are words divided by 52, before proofreading.

The newsletter is the case people do not expect. This one stores its text straight across the page, and the converter keeps the order the file stores, so the left and right columns alternate line by line. Untangling 40 words takes longer than typing them.

The cost of retyping you do not see: errors

Typed text has typos, and typos in prose are easy to spot. Typos in numbers are not: 3750 typed as 3570 reads perfectly well. A conversion copies the characters that are in the file, so an amount comes out as it was printed, digit for digit.

That makes the choice for numbers-heavy documents (statements, invoices, price lists) almost always “convert”, and it means that if you do retype, the numbers need a second pass that the prose does not. The same habit works for both routes: add up a column and compare it with the printed total. Bank statement to Excel shows it on a statement.

Scans change the math

A scan has no text in it, so converting a scan gives you pictures, not words. Run OCR PDF first: it reads the page and adds the text, and reports how sure it is. Our 1-page test scan read 27 words at 95 % average confidence in about 1.5 seconds. OCR guesses, though, so a scanned page needs proofreading either way, which narrows the gap. For a short, badly scanned page, or handwriting, retyping is often the honest answer.

The honest part

We make a converter, and we would still rather you retype 1 paragraph than spend 10 minutes converting and cleaning it. For a few lines, the quickest route is often your PDF viewer: select the text, copy, paste. For just the words of a longer document, without Word, PDF to text gives plain text, line by line.

And if you only want to change a few words, neither route is needed: the editor changes the text in the PDF itself and leaves everything else as it was. For which format to convert to in the first place, see PDF to Word, Excel and text, and for what conversion keeps, convert a PDF to Word you can edit.