Word to PDF
Convert a .docx to PDF, laid out again from its structure.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded, and you can verify that in your browser's network tab. Verify it yourself: open your browser's network tab and watch. You will see one small request asking whether you have tasks left - a tool name and a hash, never the file.
What this does
This reads a .docx directly: the file is unzipped, its XML is parsed, and the document's structure is laid out afresh by our own typesetter. Headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, images and hyperlinks all come across. What does not come across is Word's own pagination - the text is re-flowed, so page breaks will not always fall where Word put them. For a CV, a letter, a report or a contract that difference is invisible; for a document whose layout is load-bearing, Word's own Save as PDF is the honest answer.
Use it when you need a PDF and Word is not to hand: a CV that an application form insists on receiving as a PDF, a contract you want to send in a format nobody edits by accident, or a document sitting on a phone where installing an office suite is not a realistic step.
How it works
- Drop your .docx files onto this page. Up to 20 at a time, each up to 100 MB.
- Choose the paper size, orientation and margins. Normal margins are 56 points on every side, which sits close to Word's own default.
- Leave keep hyperlinks on so web addresses become real, clickable annotations rather than blue text that does nothing.
- Leave bookmarks from headings on and the PDF outline builds itself from your heading styles.
- Under advanced options, switch on combine into one PDF if several documents should arrive as a single file.
- Press Convert. Each document downloads as its own PDF unless you asked for them merged.
The conversion is a re-layout, not a re-render. Word's pagination is the product of Word's line-breaking, hyphenation and widow rules, and reproducing it exactly means reproducing all three. Instead the document's structure is measured against the paper you chose and flowed onto pages here, with the same widow and orphan control every conversion on this site uses. A heading is never left stranded alone at the foot of a page, and a single line is never left behind by itself.
Headers, footers and page-margin content are not carried across. The document model behind every conversion here describes flowing content - paragraphs, lists, tables, images - and it has no slot for a running header or a footer that repeats. If your document depends on a letterhead in the header, convert it first and then apply the letterhead with Stamp PDFs, which puts it on every page more reliably than a header ever did.
Fonts are the other honest limit. A Unicode font is embedded by default, about 2 MB of Noto Sans and Noto Sans Mono served from this site's own origin, so curly quotes, accents and Vietnamese diacritics survive. That set does not cover Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic or Indic scripts, because the faces that would are tens of megabytes each. Characters it cannot draw are reported to you rather than quietly swapped for boxes.
Bookmarks build themselves from the heading styles. Heading 1 through Heading 6 become outline entries at the matching depth, so a long report arrives with a working navigation pane that nobody had to add by hand. It is also what makes a batch conversion usable: combine twenty documents into one PDF and each file's headings sit under its own branch of the outline rather than in a flat list.
A legacy .doc is a different format entirely and is not supported. The drop zone accepts one anyway, so it can tell you what to do about it instead of refusing the file with no explanation. Open it in Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs, save it as .docx, and come back.
What this tool cannot do
- Page breaks are recalculated rather than copied. Text is re-flowed onto the paper you choose, so a break can fall a paragraph earlier or later than Word placed it.
- Headers, footers and other page-margin content are not carried across. Add what you need afterwards with Add page numbers or Stamp PDFs.
- Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Indic scripts are outside the embedded font's coverage. Characters that cannot be drawn are reported rather than silently replaced.
- The legacy .doc format is not supported. Save the file as .docx in Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs first.
Questions people ask
- Will the PDF look exactly like my Word document?
- Close, but not page for page. Headings, bold and italic, lists, tables, images and links are all reproduced, and the text is then re-flowed onto the paper size you chose, so a page break can land a paragraph earlier or later than Word put it. For a CV, a letter or a report that difference is invisible. For a form, a certificate or anything where position carries meaning, use Word's own Save as PDF.
- Can I convert an old .doc file?
- No. The .doc format is a binary container from the 1990s with nothing in common with the zipped XML of .docx, so supporting it would mean a second converter rather than a small addition. Open the file in Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs, save it as .docx, and convert that. This tool accepts a .doc just long enough to say so rather than rejecting it without a reason.
- My document uses a font I installed. Will it look the same?
- No. The text is set in Noto Sans, or in the standard PDF fonts if you turn embedding off. A .docx names the fonts it wants but does not usually contain them, and fetching a commercial typeface on your behalf is not something this tool can or should do. Line lengths therefore differ slightly from Word's, which is one of the reasons page breaks move.
- Do pictures in my document come through?
- Yes. Images embedded in the .docx are extracted and placed in the flow at their stated size, and a picture used several times is carried once rather than stored repeatedly. Text boxes, shapes and SmartArt are not: they are positioned artwork rather than flowing content, and the model this conversion runs through describes flow.
- Is my document uploaded to convert it?
- No. The .docx is unzipped and parsed in a Web Worker inside your browser, and the PDF is written there too. What the page fetches is the Noto font file, from this site's own origin and cached after the first use, and the small request that asks whether you have tasks left. Open the network tab and convert something if you would rather check than take our word for it: no part of the document is in either.
- Can I convert several documents at once?
- Yes, up to 20 in a single pass, and each becomes its own PDF by default. Switch on combine into one PDF under advanced options and they are assembled into one document in the order they are listed, with every file's headings kept as a separate branch of the outline.