Word to PDF
Set a Word document on paper, with its headings, lists, tables and pictures.
Drop files here
Or paste them, or pick them from this device. Nothing is uploaded: the work happens in this tab.
Files in this tab
Nothing is loaded yet.
Options
What the PDF will be called.
The size and margins in the file, or A4 with 20mm where it names none.
A multiple of the text size. 1.4 is what a book uses.
Even word spacing; an uneven right edge.
Helvetica.
Advanced
A TrueType or OpenType font to set the text in. Needed for anything the built-in typefaces cannot draw — Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese. The file is read here, in this tab, and embedded in the PDF.
Make the PDF
Add a file to get started.
What this does
This reads what a Word document says — headings, paragraphs, bold and italic, lists, tables, pictures, links, and the page size and margins it was set up for — and sets it on paper. It is a conversion rather than a facsimile: the text is set again from scratch, so the line and page breaks fall where this engine puts them and the page count may differ from Word’s.
What it will not do
Every tool here says what it cannot do, in its own words, before you rely on it.
- This converts the document rather than reproducing Word's layout of it: the text is set again from scratch, so the lines and the page breaks fall where this engine puts them, not where Word put them. It is not a facsimile and the page count may differ.
- What is read is what the document says: headings, paragraphs, bold and italic runs, lists, tables, embedded pictures, hyperlinks, and the page size and margins it was set up for.
- What is not read is what Word would have drawn: styles beyond the heading levels, tabs and their stops, columns, text boxes, shapes, charts, headers and footers stored in the document, footnotes, endnotes, comments and tracked changes.
- A cell that spans several rows is set as a cell in the row it starts in; only spans across columns survive.
- A `.doc` from before 2007 is a different format altogether and cannot be read. Save it as `.docx` first.
- Text is set in the standard fonts every reader already carries, so the file renders identically on a machine that has none of your fonts installed. Anything they cannot draw needs a font file, which is embedded and subsetted into the PDF with it.
- A font file you supply is used for everything: bold, italic and monospaced text are all drawn in that one face rather than in a bold, italic or fixed-width cut of it. Code blocks and columns of figures lose their alignment as a result, so supply one only when the built-in fonts cannot draw your text.
- Shaping and joining come from the font itself, and nothing reorders a line: text is drawn in the order it is given, so a line mixing right-to-left and left-to-right writing comes out in that order rather than in reading order.
Questions people ask
Will it be identical to what Word prints?
No. Matching Word’s layout exactly means implementing Word, and this does not. What survives is the content and its structure; what does not is Word’s own pagination, text boxes, shapes, headers stored in the document, footnotes and tracked changes.
It will not read my .doc file.
A .doc from before 2007 is an entirely different format. Open it in Word or LibreOffice and save it as .docx first.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. The work happens in this browser tab, on your own machine. There is no server in this product to send a file to, which is why the promise is checkable rather than something you have to take on trust: open your browser's network panel and watch it do the work without making a request.
Is there a size limit, or a limit on how many files?
None that we impose. The limit is your own machine's memory, because that is where the work happens — a few hundred megabytes is comfortable on a laptop, and less on a phone. There is no daily task counter, no queue and no account.
What does it cost, and what is the catch?
Nothing, and there is no paid tier that unlocks features: the whole product is the free one. That is affordable because running it costs us nothing — your computer does the work — so there is no per-file cost to recover, no advertising and no data to sell.