Hi Kathy:
No.
The issue is that the content of a PDF is not necessarily "text". The
content of a PDF is not expressed in a form that can be recognised as
"text".
Even if a PDF contains "characters", as Elliott notes, the characters are
not necessarily in any specific sequence. PDF is a "page description"
language. Content often appears in PDF in the order that the printer will
make up the image for the page.
Because PDF is a page description language, each element (i.e. Each piece of
ink on the page) contains a "position" (so many pixels in and so many pixels
down the page...)
Which means that content can appear in the file in ANY sequence that suits
the generating application.
Microsoft Word does a bit of that, itself. All of the headers, footers,
styles and graphics are all lumped into containers at the extreme bottom of
the file.
And the text normally contains no positioning at all: Word "pours" text onto
the screen, character by character. There is no such thing as a "page" in a
Word file, it generates page images on the way out to the screen or the
printer, they don't exist within the file.
So you have two completely different paradigms for representing information,
in Word and PDF. If you get the text out at all, consider yourself lucky.
An experienced Word user knows that having done so, it is far, far quicker
to discard any formatting that came with it and start again than to try to
fix the formatting you got from the PDF.
Word naturally formats text using STYLES. Styles are simply named
collections of formatting properties. PDF does not describe styles, only
their individual properties. Far better to strip the formatting from ex-PDF
text and re-apply the correct styles. Not only quicker, but completely
consistent.
As Phillip notes, the "Save as a Word document" facility in Acrobat 7 and
later can be useful for retrieving the text from a PDF. But discard the
formatting that comes with it, and do not depend on the text being in the
correct sequence.
Sorry: What you see is about the best you're going to get. There are no
"good" answers.
Which is why I tend to get straight back to people who send me a PDF and ask
them for a usable copy of whatever it is. For my purposes, PDF is "pretty,
but useless"
Cheers