Convert pdf to word / No Arabic!

Your question about backward conversion, ie. PDF – Word.

In my opinion, as a long user of PDF format, the answer is how the PDF handles text and other assets on the page or in the document which you're converting to PDF in the first place, and surely which application is doing the conversion ie. AutoCAD, Photoshop, InDesign, Microsoft Office… etc. Whether the user used Adobe technology in the conversion or another technology from Apple, Microsoft, Cannon and what have you. Moreover, we need to understand that PDF is a compression format, so when converting a Word document to PDF, certain internal file structures will be changed in the process to make the PDF as small as possible in file size. Then we have many font issues to address.

All the above in making any PDF will affect later the backward conversion process. So even though Adobe is improving backward conversion with any new version so that we have now some above 85% (this figure is from me) of success rate with English or Latin content, on the other hand we have less than 15% (this figure is from me) of success rate for a PDF with Arabic content. 

I'm not going to defend Adobe at all in this matter. As you said, Adobe created the PDF and they developed Acrobat, they support Arabic in many ways, but are dragging their feet when it comes to these few - high in demand - options. I personally have passed our requests to Arab Adobe personnel in order to share it with the concerned team.

What surprises me is that when the Middle Eastern version of Acrobat and few other Adobe applications used to be localized/Arabized by a French company named Winsoft, we used to have better Arabic support in Acrobat as far as I remember. So I believe our requests aren't that hard to be met.

I have no comment on your suggestion to fund the Acrobat team to consider fixing the above-discussed bugs and shortcoming.