How to convert Word to PDF here
The default settings suit a letter, a report or a CV, so for most documents the first two steps are all you need.
- Add the .docx file, or several. Try with a sample document loads a two-page report with a logo, a table, lists, a header and a footer, made in Word for this page.
- Look at the summary under the file name: about how many words, tables and pictures, and the page count Word saved with the file. That last number is the one to compare with the PDF.
- Under Output, keep Bookmarks from headings and Title and author in the PDF switched on unless you have a reason not to. Type a page range such as 1-3, 5 or 8- to convert part of the document, and change Paper size only when the recipient needs A4 or US Letter.
- Open Pictures and security if you want smaller pictures or a password on the PDF.
- Press Convert to PDF. One document downloads by itself as the same name with .pdf at the end; several arrive together as word-to-pdf.zip.
- Check the preview, drawn from the PDF just made, and open the conversion report. If it lists items to check, compare the pages with the print view before you send the file.
The converter needs no copy of Microsoft Word, LibreOffice or any other office program on your device. It reads the file format itself, so it works the same on a Chromebook, a borrowed laptop or a phone.
What happens to your document: it is never uploaded
A Word file is often the draft of something private: a contract before signature, a CV with your address, a letter to a doctor or a landlord. Most online converters upload it to their servers, convert it there and keep it for a retention period described in their privacy policy. This page works differently. The document is read into the memory of this browser tab, converted by code running in the tab, and handed back to you as a download. The file, its name, its text and any password you choose never leave your device.
You do not have to take that on trust. The 60-second check: open your browser’s developer tools (F12, or Cmd+Option+I on a Mac), choose the Network tab, then add a document and convert it. You will see the converter’s own code and font files load from this site, plus the site’s consent and analytics requests, which carry no file data. You will not see a request anywhere near the size of your document. Are online PDF converters safe? walks through the same test for any site.
What converts well, and what does not
The converter is built for text-first documents: letters, reports, essays, contracts, CVs, minutes, invoices and simple forms. For those it carries across what matters when a PDF is read or printed:
- Paragraph formatting: alignment including justified text, indents and hanging indents, spacing before and after, line spacing, borders and shading, keep with next and page break before.
- Character formatting: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, colour, highlight, size, superscript and subscript, small caps and all caps.
- Headings, numbered and bulleted lists with their real numbers (1.1, 1.2, a), b) and so on), tab stops, and the dot leaders of a table of contents.
- Tables with their column widths, merged cells, borders, shading and cell margins; header rows repeat on each page, and rows marked not to split stay together.
- Pictures, headers and footers with live page numbers, footnotes and endnotes, sections with their own page size, orientation and margins, and hyperlinks.
Some things are approximated, and the report always says so: text boxes and shapes are placed as framed paragraphs where they are anchored, charts and SmartArt appear as a labelled box with their data or text, equations are written on one line in plain notation, and newspaper columns are laid out as a single column. Pictures that float beside text in Word are placed on their own line. Right-to-left text such as Arabic or Hebrew is laid out left to right, so it is not usable yet.
If a document leans on those features, such as a magazine layout, a flyer built from text boxes or a maths paper, the print view described below will usually give a better result, and Word’s own Save as PDF better still.
We tested the converter on 19 documents made in Word for the purpose: letters, a 20-page report with a table of contents, a CV, a contract with numbered clauses, an invoice, a form, footnotes, pictures with captions, a landscape section, tracked changes, text boxes, a two-column newsletter, Cyrillic and Greek text, a chart and equations. Each PDF had the same number of pages as Word’s own PDF export of the same file, and every word of body text was present.
Fonts, and why the PDF may look slightly different
A PDF carries its fonts inside it, so it looks the same on every screen and printer. Word’s own export embeds the fonts installed on your computer. This converter cannot do that: Calibri, Cambria, Aptos and the other Office fonts belong to Microsoft and come with Windows and Office under a licence that does not let a website hand them out. What it can do is embed fonts that are free to share and have the same letter widths.
- Calibri becomes Carlito, and Cambria becomes Caladea, both made to match those fonts character for character in width.
- Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New become Arimo, Tinos and Cousine, the designs the Liberation Sans, Serif and Mono fonts are built from, which were drawn to the same widths.
- Aptos, the newer Office default, and fonts with no free match are set in the closest of these by style, spaced to the original’s average letter width.
Same widths means the same number of words on each line, so lines, pages and the page numbers in a table of contents break where Word breaks them. The letters themselves look a little different if you compare closely: Carlito is rounder than Calibri, for example. The report names every replacement, such as “Font Calibri replaced by Carlito, which has the same letter widths, so lines and pages break in the same places.”
Only the characters your document uses are embedded, split by script, so a document in English loads the Latin files and nothing more. Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese are covered. Scripts the shipped fonts do not include, such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew or the scripts of India, are listed in the report as characters that could not be drawn; the print view uses your device’s own fonts and shows them.
The fonts are shared under the SIL Open Font Licence, whose text is published with them on this site.
Links, bookmarks and document properties
Hyperlinks stay clickable in the PDF: web addresses, email links, and links to places inside the document such as the entries of a table of contents or a cross-reference to a bookmark. A printed-to-PDF document loses all of these, which is one of the main reasons to convert instead of printing.
With Bookmarks from headings switched on, every paragraph set in Word’s Heading 1, Heading 2 or Heading 3 style becomes an entry in the PDF’s bookmarks panel, nested as in Word’s navigation pane. A reader can then jump to a section from the sidebar of any PDF viewer. Headings that were made by hand, with bold text and a bigger size but the Normal style, do not become bookmarks; apply the heading styles in Word first if you want them.
Title and author in the PDF copies the document’s title, author, subject and keywords from File, Info in Word into the PDF’s properties. Viewers show the title in the window bar, and search engines use it for PDFs published online. Switch it off when those fields hold something you would rather not share, such as an old author name from a template.
Tables, images, headers and footnotes
Tables keep the column widths Word stored in the file. Cells merged across and down stay merged, borders and shading come from the table’s own formatting or its table style, and a header row repeats at the top of each page when the table runs over a page break, as it does in Word.
Pictures are placed at their size, with any crop you applied in Word. PNG pictures with transparency are drawn on white, and GIF and SVG pictures are converted to a form every PDF viewer can show. Older EMF and WMF drawings, common in documents from old versions of Office, cannot be drawn by a browser; they appear as a labelled box, and the report says so.
Headers and footers follow Word’s rules: a different first page, different odd and even pages, and a new header for each section. Page numbers and the total number of pages are live, so a footer reading “Page 3 of 12” is correct on every page of the PDF. When you convert only a page range, the pages keep their numbers from the full document, so page 5 still says page 5.
Footnotes are collected under a Notes heading at the end of the document rather than at the foot of each page, with the note numbers in the text unchanged, and the report says so. Setting notes at the foot of the right page would mean guessing where Word puts each page break around them, and a wrong guess would move text. Endnotes are placed at the end as in Word. If notes must sit on their own pages, use the print view or Word’s own export.
.doc, .rtf, .odt and Pages files
The converter reads the .docx format used by Word since 2007, including .docm files (macros are ignored and never run) and .dotx templates. It checks what is inside the file rather than trusting the extension. Older and other formats are refused with an explanation, because they are different file formats altogether. Re-save them as .docx first:
- Word for Windows or Mac: open the file, choose File, Save As, and pick Word Document (.docx) as the format.
- Google Docs: upload the file to Google Drive, open it with Google Docs, then choose File, Download, Microsoft Word (.docx).
- LibreOffice Writer: open the file, choose File, Save As, and pick the Word document type that ends in .docx.
- Pages on a Mac, iPhone or iPad: open the document and choose File, Export To, Word, or on iPhone and iPad the More menu, Export, Word.
A .docx protected with a password to open is also refused, because its contents are encrypted and the converter does not decrypt Office files. Remove the password in Word (File, Info, Protect Document) and convert the copy.
The print view, explained
Every document card has an Open print view button, and a failed conversion offers it too. It opens the document in a new tab of this site, drawn by a different engine (the open-source docx-preview library) as a web page sized to the document’s paper and margins, and then opens your browser’s print dialog. Choose Save as PDF as the printer, and the browser writes the PDF with its own engine.
Use it when the report lists many approximations, when the document uses a script the shipped fonts do not cover, or when a chart or diagram matters: the print view uses your device’s own fonts and draws more of Word’s layout features. It has two costs. It needs the print dialog, one document at a time, and the result depends on your browser, so page breaks may not match Word’s. Whether links and a bookmarks panel survive depends on the browser.
PDF size and picture quality
Text costs almost nothing in a PDF; the size comes from pictures and fonts. Keep leaves pictures as they are stored in the document, which is the right choice for most files. Balanced reduces large photos to 200 dots per inch at the size they are printed and saves them as JPEG at quality 75%, and Small goes to 150 dots per inch at quality 60% for the smallest file. Text, lines and table borders are never affected by these settings.
Word documents often carry phone photos pasted in at full resolution, several megabytes each, printed the size of a postcard. Balanced usually makes such a file a fraction of its size with no visible difference on screen. If the PDF is still too big for an email or an upload form, run it through Compress PDF, which can aim at a target such as 2 MB, and read How to reduce PDF file size for where the bytes come from.
After converting: merge, split, protect
A converted PDF often goes on to another step. Put a covering letter and a report into one file with Merge PDF, send only some pages with Split PDF, or shrink an image-heavy result with Compress PDF. To lock the PDF, switch on the password under Pictures and security before converting: the PDF then asks for it before it opens, encrypted with AES-256, the standard strong option in current PDF readers. Share the password separately from the file.
Going the other way, from a PDF you received back into an editable Word file, is a different and harder job; PDF to Word does it in the browser too, including scanned pages, and How to save a Word document as a PDF covers Word’s own export options on every platform.
Your data
Only your choices are remembered, in this browser’s local storage under dtc.filetools.v1: bookmarks, title and author, picture quality and paper size. The documents, their names, the PDFs, page ranges and passwords stay in the tab’s memory and are gone when you close it. There is no account, no counter and no record of what you converted.
General information about converting Word documents to PDF. The PDF is laid out by this converter, not by Microsoft Word, so check it before sending anything that matters, such as a signed contract, an application or a document with a strict page limit, and keep the original .docx. Microsoft Word, Calibri, Cambria and Aptos are trademarks of Microsoft; this tool is not affiliated with Microsoft.