Convert Word (.docx) to PDF
Convert a .docx into a paginated PDF in your browser, keeping headings, bold and italic text, bullet and numbered lists, and blockquotes.
- Runs in your browser
- Files are never uploaded
- Free, no account
This is a clean re-typesetting, not a facsimile
Headings, paragraphs, bold, italic, bullet and numbered lists, blockquotes, simple tables and horizontal rules are carried over. Images, columns, text boxes, footnotes, headers and footers, colours and your document’s own fonts are not — matching those needs Word’s layout engine, which no browser has.
How to convert a Word document to PDF
- Drop a
.docxfile onto the box above. It is unzipped and read in this tab by Mammoth — nothing is uploaded. - Check the structure counts: words, headings, paragraphs and list items found in the document.
- Choose the page size, typeface, body text size and margin. Headings scale automatically from the body size.
- Press Create PDF, then download. Adjust a setting and press Rebuild to try another layout instantly.
What survives the conversion
| Element | Result |
|---|---|
| Paragraphs | Preserved, wrapped and paginated |
| Headings 1–6 | Preserved, set in bold at a proportional size |
| Bold and italic runs | Preserved, including bold italic |
| Inline code and monospaced runs | Preserved as Courier |
| Bullet and numbered lists | Preserved, including nesting and hanging indents |
| Blockquotes | Preserved, indented with a vertical rule |
| Horizontal rules | Preserved |
| Tables | Redrawn with proportional columns and a bold header row; merged cells are lost |
| Images, charts, shapes | Skipped — the count is reported before you export |
| Headers, footers, footnotes, page numbers from Word | Not carried over; this tool can add its own page numbers |
| Columns, text boxes, fields, comments, tracked changes | Not carried over |
| Fonts, colours, highlighting | Replaced by your chosen standard typeface in black |
Why it is a re-typesetting, not an export
When Word exports a PDF it uses its own layout engine and the fonts installed on your computer, reproducing the document glyph for glyph. A browser has neither. What it can do — and what this tool does — is read the document's structure and set it cleanly from scratch: parse the OOXML into semantic HTML with Mammoth, turn that into a list of typesetting instructions, and lay them out with pdf-lib using real font metrics for word wrapping and pagination.
The result is a tidy, readable, fully text-selectable PDF that says the same thing as the original. It will not be pixel-identical, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. When exact fidelity matters — a signed contract, a designed brochure — use Word's own Save as PDF. When you want a clean PDF of a document's content without uploading it anywhere, this is the faster and more private route.
Fonts and non-Latin text
The three typefaces offered here — Helvetica, Times and Courier — are part of the PDF standard's base 14, which means they are not embedded in the file at all. Every reader already has them. That keeps the output tiny (often under 100 KB for a long document) and guarantees identical rendering everywhere.
The trade-off is coverage: those fonts are encoded with WinAnsi, which spans Western European alphabets. Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, CJK and emoji cannot be drawn. Rather than crashing or silently dropping them, the converter transliterates what it can (stripping diacritics, mapping typographic dashes and quotes) and reports exactly how many characters it had to replace with a question mark, so you know whether the output is usable.
Only .docx, not .doc
The modern .docx format is a ZIP of XML parts and can be read in
a browser. The legacy .doc format is an entirely different
binary structure inherited from Word 97, and no browser library reads it
reliably. If you have a .doc, open it in Word or LibreOffice and
save it as .docx first — the tool detects the old format and
tells you so rather than failing obscurely.
Going the other way? See PDF to Word. Writing in plain text or Markdown instead? Try Text to PDF and Markdown to PDF.
Questions
How faithful is the result?
It is a clean re-typesetting, not a pixel copy. Headings, paragraphs, bold, italic, lists, blockquotes and horizontal rules survive. Tables are flattened to text rows, and images, columns, footnotes, headers and footers are dropped.
Why not identical to Word’s own export?
Matching Word exactly needs Word’s layout engine and your installed fonts. In the browser we read the document with Mammoth and set it with the standard PDF fonts, which is reliable and private but not a facsimile.
Does it support .doc files?
No — only the modern .docx format. The old binary .doc has an entirely different structure. Open it in Word or LibreOffice and save as .docx first.
What about non-Latin text?
The standard PDF fonts cover Western European characters. Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and CJK cannot be embedded from those fonts, so the tool reports how many characters it had to substitute rather than failing silently.