Using PDF as background of Word document

Question

Original problem: I have a PDF document with me which I wish to comment on. However, I have yet to find a PDF editor that has the versatility of text boxes, comments and equation editors etc. as Microsoft Word itself.

As such, I thought of the idea of using the PDF document as a background to a word document, of which I can comment flexibly as much as I want. However, I have yet to find such a function on Word online. How can I go about doing this?

A little more details: I am not interested and having to edit the PDF itself, and I do not even need the final document (after commenting on Word) to detect texts from the original PDFs. In other words, I'm happy with the PDF just being a picture in the Word document. A possible solution will be to convert every page of PDF into a picture file, then manually add into Word as background/picture, but given that the document is >100 pages, I seek a less tedious solution.

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Remark: I also welcome comments which suggest an alternative solution to my original problem.

Solution

Here's a possible workaround

• Export all the pages in the PDF file to PNG with some tools like PDFCreator or PDF-XChange. Some more suggestions can be found in How to convert a multi-page PDF file to PNG files, with one PNG file per page of the PDF document?
• Create a new blank document in Word
  • Set all margins to 0 by going to Layout > Margins > Custom Margins and set the top/left/bottom/right margin values
  • Set the page rotation to match the original PDF file (portrait or landscape)
• Select all the exported images then drag and drop onto the Word document. Alternatively select Insert > Pictures and insert all pictures

Now you already have the desired document. Unfortunately Word doesn't allow you to comment on a picture or at random positions in the page. Therefore you need to create a frame and type texts on it. This way you can also select texts in the frame and create a new comment for it. See How can I add a comment in word in a text box?

Comments

[phuclv]

are you limited to Word online? Do you have access to the offline version?

[yellowello]

@phuclv That was confusing on my side, but I do mean the offline version (I meant I couldn't find any function on Word when looking for it online).

[phuclv]

it's not tedious at all. There are a lot of tools to convert PDF to images How to convert a multi-page PDF file to PNG files, with one PNG file per page of the PDF document?

[yellowello]

That will work for "normal" documents with mostly texts, but unfortunately, mine contains lots of equations and diagrams, and doing so distorts the formatting significantly enough to render it an unviable option.

[phuclv]

Even MS Word supports opening and editing PDF files, you don't need to buy Adobe Acrobat for that. But PDF files typically don't contain paragraph information so it'll just work for very simple files, otherwise the output file will just be a mess of broken texts

[Shayan]

In my case, adding a text box is working fine. Didn't bother with developer tools and adding legacy frames.