Word to PDF

A Word to PDF converter takes a .docx and produces a PDF: a file that looks the same on every machine, cannot be edited by accident, and is what almost every application form, job posting and publisher asks you to send. Word itself can do this, and so can LibreOffice and Google Docs. This page is for the times when opening a word processor is not the fastest route, or when the document should not leave your machine.

A .docx is a zip archive of XML. Inside it, the part named word/document.xml holds the content: a list of paragraphs, each one marked with the style it uses, each holding runs of text. That is a far better starting point than a PDF gives you in the other direction, because the structure is real rather than inferred. A heading says it is a heading. A list item says it is in a list. Nothing has to be guessed from where the text sits on the page.

What this page does with that is typeset the document fresh. Headings keep their level and are set larger and bold, with space above them. Paragraphs wrap to the page width you choose. List items keep their bullet. Then the lines are laid onto A4, Letter or A5 pages at the body size you pick, and the result is saved as a PDF.

Typeset fresh is the important phrase, and the honest limit of this approach. It is not the same as reproducing your document pixel for pixel. The fonts are the standard PDF ones rather than whatever your document specifies, because embedding an arbitrary font family in the browser means shipping that font. Tables arrive as their cell text in reading order rather than as ruled grids. Images, headers, footers, footnotes and page numbering are not carried over. Multi-column layouts become a single column.

So the question worth asking before you start is which of two jobs you have. If you need the PDF to look exactly like your Word file, with its fonts and its tables and its logo in the corner, use Word or LibreOffice and export from there: they have the document model and this does not. If what you need is the content of the document as a clean, readable, unalterable PDF, which covers most of what people actually send, this produces that in one step and without uploading anything.

That last point is the reason this exists. The free Word to PDF services almost all work by uploading your document to a converter and emailing or linking the result back. A CV, a signed contract, a medical form or an internal memo has then been on someone else's machine. Here the archive is unzipped in the browser tab, the text is laid out in the tab, and the PDF is assembled in the tab. Watch the network panel while you convert: nothing is sent.