![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2cE2PLq9O9vjzxU4xgnPXmm_UZJAFDJp8g6P4HKm6DKvrGH9dpZQAunZB06Sg0CMEWhh9nLtDffgQqQoCHVseogfxSwk8_dai48jrRSQulpLhT8YWTYeOhghDXcr64SMgwGjRTf8ek6o9/s640/google-docs-pdf-convert.png)
I've tried to convert an excerpt from the book Rework and the result wasn't great. About 10% of the text has been incorrectly converted and the formatting hasn't been preserved.
"This document contains text automatically extracted from a PDF or image file. Formatting may have been lost and not all text may have been recognized," explained Google in a note included in the document.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwGuljzgwtRwQU4UFomcd684FwzEYGDjg-fSOTvAtKMX8tb1ggKg8iP335fF1eo4JFiEePJ6iKgsFr9IKnAiHasQjhbQ71G5LSS2sDSSDzZr6C-HpMhp8Ix_sYRXSNPg3TAzom4klBsbYX/s640/google-docs-pdf-convert-2.png)
To be fair, ABBYY Online wasn't able to produce much better results:
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_2H2h2w2TzmQFaUd_j7dS1FqwI8QA-YxDZ6kVwlAfP3S5tisUXNh6jyevphDES4WxpIF49x-5yw19oRG_y1nj_OeylLTdMigw7bRFw8qf9-RKHMBaDDRX85RcDA6MS6bnPY1WHPE2VNJi/s640/google-docs-pdf-convert-3.png)
Update: Google Docs Blog says that this feature only works for the following languages: English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. "For the technically curious: we're using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) that our friends from Google Books helped us set up. OCR works best with high-resolution images, and not all formatting may be preserved."
{ spotted by George }