Word to PDF

How to turn a Word document into a PDF

A PDF is what you send when the document has to arrive looking the same on every machine, and when nobody is meant to edit it by accident. Word can do this itself, under Save as or Export, and if you have Word open that is the shortest way. This is for when you do not: a borrowed computer, a phone, a machine with no Office on it.

1. Drop the .docx on the box at the top.
2. Wait a moment while the document is read. It is read here, on your computer.
3. Look at what was found: how many paragraphs, tables and pictures.
4. Press Make the PDF, and look at the first page it shows you.
5. Press Save the PDF if it looks right.

What comes across, and what does not

This tool reads what the document says and lays it out again on a clean A4 page. The words come across with their bold and their italic, and so do the headings, the bullet and numbered lists, the tables, the links and the pictures. The text stays text: it can be selected, searched, copied and read aloud, which is the whole point of a PDF made from a document rather than a photograph of one.

The page layout is ours, not Word's. Where a page breaks here is not where Word broke it, and the font is the one built into every PDF reader rather than the one on your machine. Anything that is page furniture rather than content - headers and footers, page numbers, columns, text boxes, shapes, drawings, footnotes, tracked changes, comments - is left out.

So: a letter, a CV, an essay, a report, a set of notes comes out looking like itself. A poster, a newsletter, a form or anything laid out to the millimetre does not, and for those you want Word's own Save as PDF.

Why the other sites look more exact

Because they do it on a server. Smallpdf, iLovePDF and Google all run Word's layout engine, or LibreOffice standing in for it, on a machine of theirs: your document is uploaded, opened by a real word processor, printed to PDF and sent back. That is why the result is exact, and it is also why your document sat on somebody else's computer for a while.

This site has no server. Your document is read by the browser you are holding and never goes anywhere, which is worth a great deal for a contract, a medical letter or anything with somebody's address in it - and it costs the exactness. We would rather say that plainly than claim a fidelity we do not have.

The old .doc, and other alphabets

Only .docx is read. The old .doc from before 2007 is a completely different format, and there is no good way to read it in a browser. Open it in Word, in LibreOffice or in Google Docs and save it again as .docx.

A PDF's built-in fonts cover the Western alphabets. Accents are fine. Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic and other alphabets are not, because writing them means carrying a font file for them, and a document mostly written in one of those is refused rather than handed back full of question marks.