Acrobat DC; cannot edit; too many bounding boxes

Have a pdf document that I need to edit; however, when using Acrobat Standard DC, selecting the Edit option, every word has a bounding box. Cannot edit the text. When I convert to Word, the conversion adds multiple Section Breaks that show up randomly. The converted file has to be heavily edited, just to remove all the weird formatting that was added. How do I get rid of the bounding boxes in the pdf file?