Convert Equations in pdf to Word

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I have a few pdf documents originally written in Word 2003 and inserted with equations using Word’s Equation Editor. I have lost the original Word documents. Is there a way (including using a third-party software) which I can correctly convert the pdf files back to Word? I have tried using Nuance pdf Converter ver 6 but the results are far from satisfactory. The equations and maths symbols become almost unrecognisable, except for the alphanumeric text. I just hate to re-type all the equations again. Anyone can offer some help?

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Generally speaking, PDF-to-Word converters work by capturing the individual characters and placing them as accurately as possible in their original positions. This placement often makes the document much harder to revise than if you can simply selected, copied and pasted the text from the relevant portion of the PDF.

I’m not aware of any tool that would recognize an equation as such and reconstruct the equation object.

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As jsher2000 already mentioned, this is not a trivial task. There may be more, but I’m aware of one product that was created for the purpose of converting scanned scientific documents into other usable formats — InftyReader. The prices of the product also bear out the fact that this isn’t easily accomplished.

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