Hi mattnsis,
It sounds as though there may have been some font substitution when you converted the file from PDF to Word. Do you know what fonts were used in the document, and whether they were embedded or subsetted in the PDF? You can tell by choosing File > Properties when you have the PDF open in Reader.
Please try converting the PDF from within Reader with OCR disabled ad described in this document: How to disable Optical Character Recognition (O... | Adobe Community Please note, though, that if your PDF was created from a scanned document, and doesn't already contain selectable/editable text, your converted Word document won't contain selectable text if you disable OCR. It is, however, a good test to see where the problem lies.
Please let us know how it goes.
Best,
Sara