Convert Word to PDF
A Word file is a set of instructions for laying out text; a PDF is the finished page. Converting fixes the layout so it looks the same everywhere, which is why anything being sent outward — a CV, an invoice, a contract — should go as PDF. One thing genuinely moves during that conversion, and it is worth knowing which.
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What it does
- Headings become PDF bookmarks
- Hyperlinks stay clickable
- Headers, footers and page numbering preserved
- Tables and images placed as laid out
How to use Word to PDF
- 1
Add the Word file
Both .docx and the older .doc work, along with .odt from LibreOffice or Google Docs exports. If your document is in Google Docs, download it as .docx first rather than as PDF — Google's own PDF export is fine, but this route lets you keep working from one source file.
- 2
Convert
The document is laid out and rendered on our server. A long document with many images takes a few seconds; a letter is close to instant.
- 3
Check the pages that matter
Open the PDF and look at anything with a table, a text box, or unusual spacing. Those are where a font substitution shows up, and it is much easier to catch now than after it has been sent.
How it works
The document is opened by LibreOffice running headless, laid out with its own typesetting engine, and exported to PDF. That means the layout is recomputed from your document's instructions rather than copied from Word — the paragraph styles, tab stops, table widths and page geometry are all applied fresh.
For the overwhelming majority of documents that produces an identical result, because the instructions are unambiguous. Where it differs is where the instructions depend on something the converter does not have, which in practice means fonts and almost nothing else.
Headings marked with Word's heading styles become PDF bookmarks, hyperlinks stay live, and headers, footers and page numbering are preserved.
Why convert at all
A .docx does not describe a page; it describes how to build one. The reader's software, fonts, page size and Word version all participate, which is why the same file can look subtly different on two machines and why a document that paginated correctly on your laptop can arrive with a heading stranded at the foot of a page.
A PDF has already made every one of those decisions. What you see is what the recipient sees, on any device, forever. That is the entire reason CVs, invoices, contracts and anything else being sent outward should be PDF.
It also makes the document harder to edit casually, which is usually a feature rather than a limitation for the same set of documents.
What survives, precisely
Text, formatting and structure. All of it, including styles, lists, and indentation.
Tables. Placed as laid out. Very wide tables that Word was already fitting awkwardly will remain awkward, since the page has a hard edge.
Images. At their embedded resolution. A low-resolution image that looked acceptable on screen will look the same in the PDF and worse in print, which is a property of the image rather than the conversion.
Links. Both external URLs and internal cross-references.
Headers, footers, page numbers, footnotes. Preserved.
What does not
Comments, as noted above. Macros, which have no equivalent in a PDF. Form fields, which become static text rather than fillable boxes. And embedded objects such as a linked spreadsheet, which are rendered as they currently appear rather than kept live.
None of these are recoverable from the PDF, so keep the .docx as your editable master and treat the PDF as the copy you send.
Examples
A two-page CV
The straightforward case and the most common one. Standard fonts, simple structure, nothing to reflow. This is the conversion people are usually here for and it does not surprise.
A report using a font the server does not have
The one real failure mode. The substitute is metrically different, so lines wrap in slightly different places, and that difference accumulates until a page boundary moves. Nothing is corrupted — the text is complete and correct — but the pagination is no longer the author's.
Frequently asked questions
Why did my fonts change?
Because the font is not inside your .docx. A Word file references fonts by name and expects the machine opening it to have them, so a document set in a licensed corporate typeface reaches a converter that has never seen it. The closest available face is substituted, and since the substitute has different letter widths, line breaks move. This is the single most common difference between the Word original and the PDF.
How do I stop the fonts from shifting?
Either use fonts the converter is likely to have — the standard families that ship with every system — or embed them in the document before converting. In Word, File, Options, Save, then Embed fonts in the file. Embedding only works if the font's license allows it, which most commercial licenses do for document embedding but not all.
Do headings become bookmarks?
Yes, if they are real Word heading styles. Text you made large and bold by hand looks like a heading and is not one, so it produces no bookmark and no entry in a generated contents list. This is a good reason to use the built-in styles even in documents you never intended to convert.
Are tracked changes and comments included?
Comments are dropped. Tracked changes are rendered as they currently display in Word, so if the document is showing markup, the markup appears in the PDF. Accept or reject the changes and set the view to the final version before converting anything that is going outward — this catches people out on contracts in particular.
Further reading
- A Word Document Became 119 Bytes and Kept Every WordA short document containing a heading, a table, a bulleted list, bold and italic text and a colored paragraph was exported to five formats. The results ranged over a factor of 350 in size, and the differences are entirely about how much of the formatting each format is able to carry.
- Why "no export filter" Names the Wrong File EntirelyRun one of the most ordinary conversions there is — an HTML file to a Word document — and LibreOffice refuses with an error pointing at the file it was supposed to create. The file does not exist, so there is nothing to inspect, and the message sends you to the wrong end of the problem. Here is what is actually happening.
- Why Two Word Count Tools Give You Different NumbersWord count sounds like an objective measurement. Paste the same paragraph into Word, Google Docs, and a browser tool and you can get three different numbers. None of them is broken — they disagree about what a word is, and hyphens, numbers, and em dashes are where the disagreement lives.