If you have Microsoft Word, Pages or Google Docs to hand, use it. File, Save As (or Export, or Download) and pick PDF. The program that made the document knows exactly how it should look, and nothing in a browser will beat that.
Our Word to PDF tool is for the other times: you're on a library computer, a work laptop without Office, or a phone, and someone has sent you a .docx that needs to go into an upload form as a PDF. It works well for ordinary documents like letters, reports and simple CVs. It's less good at heavily designed ones, and it's worth knowing why before you send the result to anyone.
How the conversion works
The tool runs entirely in your browser, so the document isn't uploaded. That rules out the approach most converter sites use, which is to run a copy of Word or LibreOffice on a server.
Instead, it opens the .docx (which is really a ZIP of XML files), reads the content, and rebuilds it as a web page with Word-like default styling: Calibri at 11 pt, blue headings, grey table borders. That page is then cut into pages at your paper size, avoiding splits through a line of text, a picture or a table row. Each page is captured as an image, and an invisible text layer is laid over it so you can still select, search and copy the text.
The upshot is that the tool carries over the structure of your document faithfully, but not every detail of its formatting.
What converts well
- Paragraphs, with bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript and subscript.
- Headings that use Word's built-in styles (Heading 1, Heading 2 and so on), plus the Title, Subtitle, Quote and Caption styles.
- Bulleted and numbered lists, including nested ones.
- Tables, including merged cells.
- Pictures, embedded in the document.
- Manual page breaks and "Page break before" on a paragraph.
- Page size and margins, read from the document.
Footnotes and endnotes come through too, but they're collected at the end of the document rather than at the bottom of each page.
What doesn't carry over
This is the part to read carefully.
- Headers and footers are dropped, and with them any page numbers that lived in the footer. You can add numbers back afterwards with Page numbers.
- Fonts, font sizes and colours you set yourself are replaced by the default styling. A document in Garamond comes out in Calibri (or the closest font your device has, such as Carlito or Arial).
- Alignment isn't kept. A centred title or a right-aligned date on a letter ends up on the left.
- Hyperlinks look like links (blue and underlined) but aren't clickable in the PDF.
- Text boxes, shapes and floating pictures lose their position. Pictures and text-box text end up in the flow of the text at the point where they're anchored.
- Table borders are always drawn as thin grey lines. That's fine for a real table, but if your CV uses an invisible table to make two columns, the PDF will show the grid.
If the converter hits something it can't handle, the results screen tells you how many pieces of Word formatting couldn't be converted. Take that as a prompt to look through the PDF before sending it.
Two file limits as well: it only takes .docx. An old .doc file has to be saved as .docx first (in Word, File, Save As, Word Document). Pages files and .odt files from LibreOffice aren't accepted either.
Converting a document on EddiesPDF
- Open Word to PDF and drop your .docx onto the page.
- Leave "Page size" on "Same as the document", or choose A4 or Letter to force every page to that size.
- If you need to, open "More options" and set "Orientation" ("Portrait" or "Landscape") and "Margins": "Normal (2.54 cm / 1 in)", "Narrow (1.27 cm / 0.5 in)" or "None". Both default to "Same as the document".
- Click "Convert to PDF". Long documents show "Rendering page 3 of 12" and so on while they work.
- Check the preview on the results screen, then download.
Changing the orientation lays the text out again to fit the new width, so a portrait report switched to landscape gets fewer, wider pages rather than squashed ones. A4 versus Letter matters more than people expect: a document written on Letter and printed on A4 (or the other way round) can push one line onto a new page.
Side effects of the image-based output
Because each page is stored as a picture with invisible text on top, three things behave differently from a PDF exported by Word.
The file is usually bigger than Word's own export would be, sometimes several times bigger, because every page carries an image. If it's too big for an upload form, run it through Compress PDF, or see the guide to making a PDF small enough to email.
Text looks sharp on screen and in normal printing, but if you zoom in very far the edges soften, because they're pixels rather than outlines.
And the result depends a little on your device. Fonts are drawn with whatever your browser has, so the same .docx converted on a Windows laptop and on an Android phone can break pages in slightly different places.
When to use something else
If the document's look matters (a designed CV, a brochure, a letter on headed paper with a logo in the header), convert it in the program that made it. Word's File, Save As, PDF keeps everything, and so does Google Docs' File, Download, PDF Document. Upload the .docx to Google Drive, open it with Google Docs, and you can do this on any computer with a browser and a Google account (though that does upload the file to Google).
If you're going the other way and need to edit a PDF in Word, that's a different problem with its own trade-offs, covered in the guide to converting PDF to Word.
The quick check before you send: compare the page count with the original, scroll to the last page to make sure nothing was cut off, and look at the first page for a title that has drifted to the left.
Also useful: Compress PDF · Merge PDF
