Word to PDF

How it works

1. Drop one or more .docx files. Everything happens in this page: the document is read, laid out and written here.
2. Press Convert to PDF. A long document takes a second or two; nothing is uploaded and nothing is downloaded to make it work.
3. Download the PDF. It keeps the file's name, and each document becomes its own PDF.
4. If the result needs to go somewhere with a size limit, carry it straight into Compress PDF from the buttons under the result.

Frequently asked questions

Is my document uploaded?

No. This is the reason the tool exists in this form: the documents people convert are contracts, CVs, medical letters and internal reports, and every other free converter asks you to hand one over to a server. Here the file is opened, laid out and written in your browser, and the PDF appears on your device.

Will the PDF look exactly like it does in Word?

It will read the same, and it will not be a photograph of Word's own pagination. Word stores paragraphs, not pages: where each line and each page breaks is decided by its layout engine at the moment you open the file, which is why the same document can paginate differently in Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs. This lays the paragraphs out again with the same structure — the text, its order, the headings, the bold and italic, the lists, the tables and your page breaks — but the line breaks are ours, so a page may end a line or two earlier or later than on your screen. If a document has to match to the millimetre, print it to PDF from Word itself.

What is kept, and what is not?

Kept: paragraphs and their alignment, headings, bold and italic, bulleted and numbered lists with their levels, tables with the column widths Word recorded, inline pictures (PNG and JPEG), page breaks, and the page size and margins the document was set up with. Not kept: headers and footers, footnotes, text boxes and floating shapes, multiple columns, fields such as automatic page numbers or a table of contents, comments and tracked changes, and the document's own fonts.

Which fonts does it use?

The same three families every PDF made here is drawn with: Helvetica for Western European text, Liberation Sans where the text needs Turkish, Polish, Czech, Greek or Cyrillic letters, and Noto Sans for Japanese and Korean. A document set in Calibri or Times New Roman comes out in a clean sans serif of the same size rather than in a font nobody licensed. Accented and non-Latin characters come out as themselves, which is the part that matters.

It says my file is not a .docx.

The old .doc format from Word 2003 and earlier is a completely different kind of file — a binary format, not a zip of XML — and it is not read here. Open it in Word or LibreOffice and save it as .docx, which takes a moment. The same goes for .odt, .pages and .rtf.

Can it convert Excel or PowerPoint?

Not yet. A spreadsheet and a slide deck are laid out in ways that have almost nothing in common with a text document, so they need their own work rather than a shortcut through this one. For a spreadsheet, Excel to CSV on the conversion site gets the data out today.

What are the free limits?

Three files a run at 20 MB each, and 10 runs a day, on the free plan. PDFs written on the free plan end with one small line saying they were made with nouplo.com; Pro removes it and the limits with it.