Extracting text from a PDF: what you get
Why copy and paste goes wrong
A PDF does not hold sentences. It holds characters at coordinates, so software has to rebuild lines and spacing when you copy. That is why pasted text so often arrives with a break in the middle of every line.
Text layer or scan
Try to highlight a sentence. If individual words select, the file has a text layer and this tool will work. If nothing selects, the page is a picture and you need OCR instead.
Columns, tables and footnotes
Reading order is the weak point. A two-column article can be extracted left column, right column, or interleaved, depending on how the PDF was built. Footnotes and headers can also land in the middle of paragraphs.
What people use it for
Counting words, translating a document, searching across several files, feeding a report into another tool, or cleaning content before editing it. In each case, plain text is the easiest starting point.
Text or Word?
Choose text when you only need the content. Choose Word when you also need headings, tables and layout to survive.
If the output order looks scrambled, the PDF probably has columns. Skim the file and move paragraphs into place before you rely on it.