Word to PDF
Turn a Word document into a PDF that looks the same everywhere.
or drop files anywhere on this page
Your files stay in this browser. Nothing is uploaded.
About Word to PDF
Word to PDF here means reading a .docx file and setting its content again on A4 pages, entirely in your browser: mammoth reads the Word document's structure, and a layout engine lays real, wrapped, paginated text onto the page, rather than rendering a picture of it. The words in the PDF stay selectable text.
Reach for it when you need a readable PDF copy of a text-led document, such as a letter, a report or meeting notes, that opens the same on any device. It is a rebuild, not a copy: the words and their basic structure come across, but Word’s own page layout does not, so expect different line breaks and page breaks from the ones Word shows. Older .doc files and heavily designed layouts with exact positioning are outside what it aims to reproduce.
How it works
- Add one or more .docx files. The file picker also lists .doc, but a .doc file is refused when you convert; open it in Word and save a .docx copy first.
- Your document is laid out onto A4 pages with 1 inch margins automatically, with body text at 11 pt and headings sized by level; there is nothing else to configure.
- Click Convert to PDF.
- When you converted a single file, use Preview on the result screen to look through the pages before you send them on.
- Download the PDF, named after the Word file, or a ZIP when you added more than one file.
What comes across from the Word file
The converter reads what each part of the document is, such as a heading, a bold run or a table, and draws it again in a small fixed set of styles. It is a fresh typesetting of the same content, not Word’s page as printed.
- Headings: Title is 28 pt and centred, Subtitle 18 pt and centred, Heading 1 is 24 pt, Heading 2 is 18 pt, and Heading 3 and below are 14 pt, all in bold.
- Body text: 11 pt and left-aligned, with 1.4 line spacing and a small gap after each paragraph.
- Bold, italic and underline applied directly to text. Strikethrough, superscript and subscript arrive as ordinary text, and colour and highlighting are not kept.
- Bulleted and numbered lists, including nested ones, indented 0.3 inch per level. Every bullet becomes a round dot and every number becomes 1., 2., 3., whatever style Word used.
- Tables, as a black 1 pt grid with equal-width columns across the text width.
- PNG and JPEG images on a line of their own, centred and shrunk to fit the text width when they are wider.
- Web links, which stay clickable and are underlined, and page breaks typed in Word (Ctrl+Enter), which start a new page.
What will not match the original
Check these before you send the PDF to someone who expects the Word layout.
- Fonts: every character is drawn in Helvetica, whatever typeface the document uses.
- Page setup: the page is always A4 with 1 inch margins, even if Word is set to Letter or landscape, so line breaks and the number of pages change. Section breaks are ignored.
- Headers, footers and page numbers are not read, so they do not appear.
- Alignment and spacing: centred, right-aligned and justified paragraphs come out left-aligned, apart from Title and Subtitle. Runs of spaces and tabs collapse to one space, and empty paragraphs are dropped.
- Tables: column widths, borders and shading are not carried over, a merged cell occupies just one column, a cell’s contents run together as one paragraph, and a picture inside a cell is lost. Rows set to repeat as a header row are left out of the PDF altogether.
- Images: a picture is drawn only when it is the one thing in its paragraph, so a picture sharing a paragraph with text or with a second picture, or sitting inside a table or list, is dropped, and so are formats other than PNG and JPEG. The size you gave a picture in Word is not used; it is placed at its pixel size, one pixel to a point, and only shrunk if it is too wide or too tall for the page.
- Everything else: multi-column sections become one column, text-box text moves to just after its paragraph, and footnotes and endnotes are gathered into a numbered list at the end. Links to other places in the same document, such as contents entries, are underlined but do not jump. Tracked changes come through as if accepted, and comments are left out.
Characters the converter cannot draw
Text is drawn in Helvetica, a font every PDF viewer already has. That covers English and the Western European languages: letters such as é, ü, ñ and ø, curly quotes, dashes, the euro sign and the bullet.
Anything outside that set is drawn as a question mark, without a warning. That includes Polish, Czech and Turkish letters such as ł, č and ş, Greek and Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Arabic and Hebrew, arrows, check marks, and the true minus sign. If your document uses any of these, read through the result before you rely on it, and use Word’s own Save as PDF or Export command for that document instead.
Frequently asked questions
No, only .docx. Older .doc files are a binary format that can’t be read in the browser, and the tool stops with a message when it meets one. Open the file in Word, use "Save As" to make a .docx copy, then convert that copy instead.
No. Every character is drawn in Helvetica rather than the fonts set in your Word document. Bold, italic and underline you applied are kept; only the shape of the letters changes.
Headings (including Title and Subtitle), bold, italic, underline, web links, bulleted and numbered lists including nested ones, tables, PNG and JPEG images and typed page breaks. What each looks like, and what is dropped, is set out above.
PNG and JPEG images on their own line come across, centred and shrunk to fit if they are too big. A picture sharing a line with text, or inside a table or list, is left out, as are formats such as GIF, WMF and EMF.
Tables and lists are rebuilt from the document’s structure rather than copied as a picture. Every table column gets an equal share of the page width, every bullet is a dot and every number is a plain 1., 2., 3., so Word’s widths, shading and numbering styles are not repeated.
A4 with 1 inch margins, regardless of the page size set in Word, so a Letter-sized document is reflowed and its page breaks move.
They are drawn as a question mark and the conversion carries on. Western European letters, curly quotes and the euro sign are fine; Greek, Cyrillic, letters such as ł or č, and Chinese, Japanese or Korean text are not.
That usually means the file is password-protected, corrupted, or isn’t really a Word file, for example an old .doc renamed to .docx. Open it in Word, confirm it opens cleanly with no password, then save it as .docx again before retrying.
No. Your own browser tab does the reading and the typesetting, and the finished PDF goes straight to your downloads, so no copy of the document reaches a server.
Yes, once you export it as .docx from that program. The reader is built for .docx files from Word, Google Docs and LibreOffice, and the same limits apply to all of them.
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