I've had a recruiter ask for a Word version of my CV so that he could make minor edits to it for each relevant position, which makes sense. Otherwise, I don't think there's an excuse for not accepting a PDF.

My previous position I got through a recruiter. Demanded my resume in a Word, which ended up being a butchered and ugly version of my beautiful LaTeX-generated PDF. I understood that he was going to make a few edits, but about a year later I was going through some documents and managed to find the copy of the Word resume that he had made changes to. DRASTIC changes.

He had completely re-written huge chunks of my previous experience, changed the order of things to make me look like I had experience in areas that I definitely did not, and countless other minor changes. I couldn't believe it. His native language was definitely not English, so all of his changes had horrible spelling and grammar mistakes peppered in.

In the end I got the job, but only one other person had applied besides myself and the government agency the job was for desperately needed a body to fill a seat so I was kind of hired by default. Ended up being a crazy mess of a programming shop that I brought a bit of order to before leaving.

Be wary of those "minor edits": one recruiter took it upon themselves to add to my CV the "fact" that I was an experienced Java programmer (I'm not a programmer of any sort, at least not professionally).

CVs that I've been sent recently by recruitment agencies have been heavily edited to remove any direct contact details then add their own company headers to it anyway. I assume that's why they want it in word format.

Even if you make sure your CV is a work of art, there's no guarantee it's going to be received in that state.