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AIUI one of the problems is that an Adobe Acrobat document, as normally received (i.e. a PDF) is not the original editable document regardless of what program you have, it is a viewable document produced by Adobe Acrobat Writer from the original source document. In general (as reader rather than author of the document) you will not have the original. So you can't preserve the original formatting, because you don't have it. It's a bit like trying to maintain a program without having the source code.
Programs or websites that generate e.g. a Word document from a PDF are variable in their effectiveness. Some of them merely produce a Word document containing embedded images of the PDF pages! OK, it's a Word document, but you can't actually do anything to it.
Of course, this model keeps the source document hidden from you because it is intended to. If the author or copyright holder is OK with your having the source document, you could ask for it.
Job motivation: how the powerful steal from the stupid.
The other thing that might get some of the formatting is to export the PDF document pages as images and OCR. Many OCR programs do a fair job of preserving formatting like columns fonts etc.
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