PDF to Word

The first thing to check is a single letter

Open the converted file and look for ł. If it survived, the rest of the document almost certainly did too.

Convert one fileThen check the diacritics

A PDF stores positions, and a conversion rebuilds structure from them. Polish text adds a second question on top: whether the characters themselves came through, and that depends on how the original was produced rather than on the language.

Where Polish letters break

Documents made from a scan

There is no text underneath a scan, so nothing comes through — not the letters and not the words. This is the most common cause and has nothing to do with diacritics as such.

Files exported by older tools

Some exporters write text without the information needed to map glyphs back to characters. The page looks correct and the extracted text comes out as question marks or boxes.

Fonts without Polish coverage

If the original used a font subset that never contained ę or ś, those letters were drawn as images of letters. A conversion cannot recover a character that was never stored as one.

What a conversion does well

Documents written in Word, exported to PDF and now going back come out close to where they started, Polish text included, because the structure and the encoding were regular from the beginning.