If you have ever tried to humanize a PDF by copying the text into a box, you know what happens. Headings merge into paragraphs, bullet points lose their bullets, footnotes wander into the body, and the table on page four becomes a river of numbers. You spend longer fixing the layout than you saved on the writing. This post explains how document upload in Humanize 360 handles PDF, DOCX and TXT files, what it keeps, what it changes, and what you should still check by hand.
What the pipeline does
- Parse. DOCX files are read as structured documents, so we know which runs are headings, list items, quotes or table cells. PDFs are harder: there is no "heading" in a PDF, only text at positions. We infer structure from font size, line spacing and numbering patterns, which works well for reports and essays and less well for magazine layouts.
- Split into blocks. Each paragraph becomes a block with a type. Headings, table cells, captions, citations and code are marked as protected and are never rewritten.
- Humanize body blocks only. Every paragraph that is ordinary prose goes through the engine with your chosen mode and strength. Protected blocks pass straight through.
- Rebuild. The output is written back as DOCX (with the same heading levels and list styles) or as a fresh PDF, or as plain text if that is what you uploaded. Your original file is never modified.
What stays exactly as it was
- Heading text and heading levels
- Numbered and bulleted list structure (the text inside list items is humanized, the bullets are not)
- Tables, including header rows
- Anything in quotation marks longer than eight words
- Reference lists and in-text citations in APA, MLA, Harvard and IEEE patterns
- Figures, captions and page breaks
- Names, numbers, dates, URLs and email addresses inside body text
If your reference list is formatted unusually, add a few author surnames to your protected words before uploading. The engine will then leave every sentence containing them alone.
What changes
Body paragraphs are rewritten for rhythm and vocabulary the same way pasted text is: tell-words removed, sentence lengths varied, careful synonym swaps, contractions where the register allows. The mode you choose matters. Academic keeps a formal register and never introduces contractions. Formal is for business reports. Standard is the default for everything else.
Step by step
- Open the humanizer and switch to the Documents tab.
- Drag in your file (up to 20 MB). You will see the word count and the credit cost before anything runs.
- Pick a mode. For a thesis chapter choose Academic; for a proposal choose Formal.
- Add protected words: your name, your supervisor's name, any technical terms, product names.
- Choose the output format. Most people want DOCX back so they can keep editing.
- Run. A 5,000-word chapter takes a few seconds; there is no AI model in the loop to wait for.
- Download, open, and do the checks below.
Free accounts can try the document flow within the monthly free words. Paid plans meter documents at the same one credit per word as pasted text; Standard and above can upload several files at once.
The five-minute check afterwards
No pipeline is perfect, and a document you are going to submit deserves five minutes:
- Headings. Scroll the navigation pane. Every heading should be there at the right level.
- Numbers. Search for a few key figures from the original and confirm they survived.
- Citations. Check the first and last citation in the body, and the reference list.
- First and last paragraph. These are the ones readers and markers read most closely. Read them aloud.
- Run the detector. Paste one or two body paragraphs into the AI detector and look at the rhythm and tell-word signals.
PDF-specific advice
Scanned PDFs (photographs of pages) contain no text and cannot be processed; run them through an OCR tool first. Two-column layouts occasionally interleave; if you see sentences that jump topic mid-way, export the original to DOCX from your editor and upload that instead. Footnotes are kept but moved to the end of the page's text.
Privacy
Uploaded files and generated outputs live on our server for seven days and are then deleted automatically. They are never sent to a third-party AI provider, because there is no third-party AI provider in the pipeline. If you want a file gone sooner, delete it from your history.
When to paste instead
For anything under a page, pasting is faster and you can see the before-and-after side by side. Use upload when structure matters: chapters, reports, proposals, anything with headings and a reference list. Students working on a dissertation should read how we suggest using the tool honestly, and anyone buying for a team can compare the document limits on the pricing page.
Common questions
Does the output DOCX keep my styles? Heading levels, list styles, bold and italics survive. Custom fonts and colours are kept where the original used named styles; direct formatting on individual words is usually kept too, but check the first page.
How big a file can I upload? Up to 20 MB per file. Long theses are fine; what matters for cost is the word count, which you see before you confirm.
Can I humanize only one chapter? Yes. Upload the full document and use selective rephrase on Standard plans to pick the sections, or split the file in your editor first.
Why did a paragraph come back unchanged? Either it was protected (a citation, a quote, a caption) or the grammar guard rolled a rewrite back because it would have broken the sentence. Both are deliberate.
Where do my files go? To our server only, for seven days, then they are deleted. No third-party AI service ever sees them.