Convert Word to PDF

Four routes, and what each one costs

Word to PDF reads a .docx in this browser tab and does the layout a word processor would do, then checks the result. It needs no Word licence, no account and no upload, and it behaves the same on a Mac, a Windows machine or a Chromebook. Word's own export is the most faithful to Word's own rendering, because it is Word doing the rendering. Google Docs and LibreOffice each convert for free and each have a specific weakness.

The choice is not really about quality; all four produce a readable PDF of a plain document. It is about what happens to a document you would rather not upload, and about whether anything tells you when something was dropped.

What the browser converter draws

Text, fonts, bold, italic, sizes, colour, alignment, indents and line spacing. Tables, lists, footnotes, endnotes, headers and footers. Hyperlinks, stored pictures, shapes, text boxes, charts and SmartArt, drawn as vectors with their fill, their outline and the angle a rotated shape sits at, with the text inside them still selectable. Equations, written as the line a person would write by hand.

Every character is drawn as text with its own font, never as a picture of a page, so the PDF stays searchable and a reader can copy from it. Word keeps a formula as a tree, so reading its characters in order gives a+b2 for a plus b over 2. This tool walks the tree and writes (a+b)/2 instead, raises an exponent rather than writing a caret, and brackets a term only where the two-dimensional layout carried the meaning. What is left out is an embedded object another program owns, such as a spreadsheet dropped into the page, which is counted by kind on the receipt.

Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Greek and maths

These are laid out in their own direction rather than refused. A right-to-left paragraph is resolved character by character, so a Latin word or a run of Western digits inside it still reads left to right. Arabic letters are joined into their initial, medial and final shapes before they are drawn. Chinese breaks between characters, since the line has no space to break at, and a closing bracket or full stop is never left at the start of a line.

Greek, Cyrillic and the characters a formula is built from are drawn by the same route: the operators, the arrows, the relation and set symbols, the letterlike symbols, and the bold and italic alphanumerics that sit outside the ordinary Latin letters. The face comes from the document when the .docx embeds one; otherwise this site serves Noto subsets from its own origin and the tab fetches only the parts holding the characters on your pages. A page of ordinary Latin prose fetches none of them.

How to convert a Word document to PDF in Word

On Windows, File, Export, Create PDF/XPS, then Publish. The Options button is the part people skip and it is the part that matters: Create bookmarks using Headings turns your heading styles into a navigation pane in the PDF, Document properties carries the title and author across, and Document structure tags for accessibility is what makes the PDF readable by a screen reader. Standard versus Minimum size is the picture quality switch.

On a Mac, File, Save As, and pick PDF in the File Format list, or File, Export To, PDF. The Best for electronic distribution option keeps hyperlinks live; Best for printing flattens them. Either way the same Options dialogue sits behind the Save button.

Do not use Print to PDF

File, Print with Microsoft Print to PDF or Save as PDF in the Mac print dialogue produces a PDF of the printed page, and printed pages have no links, no bookmarks, no tags and no document properties. It is the single most common reason a Word document converts to a PDF whose clickable links are dead. Use Export or Save As, never Print, unless a flattened page is what you want.

Google Docs and LibreOffice

Google Docs exports with File, Download, PDF Document. It keeps headings as bookmarks and keeps links live, and it re-lays the document with Google's fonts, so a .docx that uses a face Google does not have comes back looking different. The document is on Google's servers either way, which for a contract or a medical letter is the whole question.

LibreOffice Writer exports with File, Export as PDF, and its dialogue is the most complete of the four: PDF/A archival output, tagged PDF, form fields, image compression and an encryption tab are all in one place. Its weakness is fidelity to Word's own layout, since it re-flows the document with its own engine, so a heavily styled .docx can shift by a line or two per page. Its command line converts a folder of documents in one pass.

The things that go wrong, and why

• Links are dead. The file went through Print instead of Export, or through the Mac print dialogue. Re-export properly.
• The fonts changed. The converting machine does not have the face the document names. Embed the font in Word under File, Options, Save, Embed fonts in the file, or convert somewhere that has it.
• The file is enormous. Pictures are stored at full camera resolution. Use Minimum size on export, or run the result through Compress PDF, which reopens the file and counts the text it kept.
• There are no bookmarks. Headings were formatted by hand with a bigger font rather than with Heading styles, so there is no structure to convert. Apply the styles first.
• Tracked changes and comments appear. They print because they are displayed. Set Review, All Markup to No Markup, or accept the changes, before exporting.

Legacy .doc, and why it is refused here

A .doc from Word 97 to 2003 is a binary compound file, not a zip of XML parts, and the two share no structure at all. The browser tool refuses a .doc at the first four bytes rather than guessing at it and converting half a document. Open it in Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs and save it as .docx, then convert that.

The same applies to .rtf, .odt and Apple Pages files. Save to .docx first. Once it is a .docx, Word to PDF reads it here with nothing installed, which is the shorter path on a machine that has no Office on it at all.

After the PDF exists

Several Word files that belong together become one document with Merge PDF, and Merge Word documents into a PDF walks through the order and the page numbering. A PDF that has to go back the other way, because someone sent you a PDF of a document you need to edit, is Convert PDF to Word. The rest of the office guides are under PDF, Word and Excel help.