Word to PDF converter

The document stays on your computer

Every well known Word to PDF converter uploads your file. It goes to a server, is converted there, and comes back, which means a copy of it existed on a machine you do not control. For a covering letter that hardly matters. For a signed contract, a diagnosis, a tenancy agreement or a set of management accounts, it is the whole question.

This page never sends the file anywhere. The conversion is done by JavaScript that arrived with the page and runs on your own device, and it has no server to talk to. Turn your internet connection off after the page has loaded and it will still work, which is the simplest demonstration of the claim.

What actually happens to the file

A .docx is a zip archive with XML inside it. The text, the headings, the lists and the emphasis are read out of that XML, and each block is then measured and laid out onto A4 pages, wrapping at the margins and starting a new page when it runs out of room. The words are written into the PDF as text.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Some converters produce a PDF by taking a picture of each page. The result looks right and is useless: you cannot select or copy a line, search will not find anything, a screen reader has nothing to read, and the file is several times larger than it needs to be. Text written as text avoids all of it.

Where the fidelity ends

Being straight about this is more useful than a claim that falls over on your first real document. Headings, paragraphs, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, bold, italic and the order everything comes in all survive. Images, text boxes, columns, headers and footers, page numbers, colours and your chosen typeface do not.

So this is the right tool for a letter, an essay, a CV, notes, an article, a policy document, a quote or a statement of work. It is the wrong tool for anything whose images carry the meaning: a report built around charts, a designed brochure, a photographic appendix. For those, Word's own Save as PDF is both free and exact, and no converter improves on it.

Tables get laid out rather than flattened. That distinction matters more than it sounds. The lazy way to handle a table is to let each cell fall out as its own paragraph, which turns a fees table into a column of unlabelled numbers that still looks like a document. Nothing tells the reader it happened, and they find out from whoever they sent it to. Here the columns are measured against their contents, cell text wraps inside its column, the header row is picked out, and a row is never split across a page break.

Why .docx and not .doc

The two share a name and nothing else. The modern .docx, standard since Word 2007, is a zip of XML files, which is what makes it readable in a browser at all. The older .doc is a binary format built around a completely different design, and reading it reliably takes far more machinery than belongs on a web page.

If you have a .doc, open it in Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice or Pages and save it as .docx. Any of them will do it in a couple of clicks, and the conversion is lossless because .docx is the richer format.

Fonts, and why the PDF is in Helvetica

A PDF that uses a font has to carry that font inside it, and it can only carry fonts it has. Your document may be set in Calibri, Aptos, Garamond or a corporate typeface that exists only on your employer's machines, and none of those are available here.

Rather than substitute something at random and reflow the text unpredictably, the output uses Helvetica, one of the fourteen standard fonts every PDF reader is required to support. That means the file stays small, opens identically everywhere, and never shows a box where a character should be.

Going the other way

To turn a PDF back into an editable Word document, the PDF to Word converter takes the text out with its headings and paragraphs. It cannot bring the layout back, and says so before you start.