Word to PDF

What carries across

The converter reads the document's structure rather than taking a picture of it, then sets the text itself, so the PDF holds real characters you can select, search and copy.

• Headings keep their hierarchy and are set larger and bold, so the outline of the document is still visible at a glance.
• Bold, italic, underline and strikethrough are kept on the exact words they were applied to.
• Bulleted and numbered lists keep their nesting, with each level indented further than the last.
• Tables are rebuilt with ruled cells, and merged cells that span several columns stay merged.
• Images embedded in the document are placed in the flow of the text, scaled down to fit the page when they are too wide.
• Web and email links remain clickable in the PDF. Links to anything else, such as local files or scripts, are dropped on purpose.
• Text is set in Helvetica, one of the fonts built into every PDF reader, so the file stays small and nothing is downloaded. It covers English and Western European languages, including accents, curly quotes, dashes and the euro sign. Letters outside it, such as Greek, Cyrillic or Polish, are replaced with a question mark, and the tool tells you how many.

What changes, and why

• Fonts are normalised to one clean sans-serif. A browser cannot read the fonts installed on the machine that wrote the document, so matching Calibri or Garamond exactly is not possible here.
• Pagination is recalculated. Page breaks fall where the text fills the page at the chosen size, not where Word put them, so a document that relied on a manual break to start a section may break differently.
• Headers, footers, footnote placement, text boxes, columns and page borders are not reproduced. They are layout instructions rather than content, and the converter only carries content.
• Tracked changes and comments are not printed. The PDF shows the document's current text, which is usually what you want to send.
• EMF and WMF drawings, which are Windows-only vector formats often used for charts pasted from Excel, cannot be drawn by a browser. The tool tells you when it has had to leave one out.
• Only the modern .docx format is read. An old .doc file from Word 97-2003 needs to be saved as .docx first.

Choosing between this and Word's own export

• If you have Word and the document's layout is designed to the millimetre, Word's own Save As PDF is the most faithful option, because it uses the same layout engine that drew the pages you see.
• This tool is the better fit when you do not have Word to hand, are on a borrowed or locked-down machine, or cannot upload the file to an online converter because of what is in it.
• For text-led documents such as letters, reports, contracts and CVs, the difference is mostly the font, and the content arrives intact.
• Pick A4 or US Letter to match where the PDF is going. Getting this wrong is the most common reason a printed PDF has odd margins.
• After converting, open the PDF and scroll through it once. Check any table that was wide in Word and any page that needed a deliberate break.
• If the PDF is too large for an email or a portal, run it through compression afterwards. Image-heavy documents shrink the most.