DOCX to PDF

A layout pass, not a screenshot

A .docx is a ZIP of XML: one part holds the content, another the styles it inherits from, another the list definitions, another the images. This converter reads all four, resolves each paragraph against its style chain the way Word does, and then lays the result out — measuring every word against real font metrics, breaking lines where they no longer fit, and starting a page when the next line would cross the bottom margin.

The alternative most browser converters take is to render the document to a canvas and paste the bitmap into a PDF page. That is far less work and it always looks approximately right, but it produces a file several times the size in which no word can be selected, searched or read aloud. Every character here is written as text.

What carries across

Text

Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, colour and per-run font size.

Structure

Heading levels 1-6, whether they come from a style name or an outline level.

Lists

Bullets and numbering, including nested levels, letters and roman numerals, and the restarts a document asks for.

Layout

Left, centre, right and justified alignment, first-line and hanging indents, tab stops, and paragraph spacing.

Tables

Cell grids with borders, merged columns and repeated header rows.

Pictures

PNG and JPEG images at the size the document set.

The page

Page size, orientation and all four margins, unless you override them in the toolbar.

And what does not

• Headers, footers and footnotes. These need a layout engine that reserves space outside the text flow and can place content into it after the flow is decided. This one has a single column and no such concept.
• Text boxes and floating shapes. Anything anchored to a position rather than sitting in the flow is left out rather than dropped somewhere plausible and wrong.
• Non-Latin scripts. The fonts built into every PDF reader cover Latin-1 and nothing else. Characters outside it become question marks, and the conversion tells you exactly how many and which.
• Page-for-page parity. Where a page breaks is this converter's own decision. The content is complete; the pagination is its own.

Frequently asked questions

Is my Word document uploaded anywhere?

No. The .docx is unzipped, read and laid out as a PDF inside your own browser tab. Nothing leaves the device, which is the main reason to use this rather than a converter that emails you a link — a contract, a payslip or a draft never becomes someone else's file.

Will the PDF look exactly like Word's own export?

Close, not identical. Headings, bold and italic, colour, alignment, indents, bullet and numbered lists, tables, images, page size and margins all carry over, and line breaks land in sensible places. What does not: headers and footers, footnotes, text boxes, floating shapes, columns and page numbering. Where a page is broken is decided by this converter's own layout, so it will not always match Word page for page.

Is the text in the PDF selectable?

Yes. Every character is written as real text with a real font, so the result can be searched, copied, indexed and read aloud. Converters that screenshot each page produce a much larger file that none of that works on.

Which fonts does the PDF use?

The three font families built into every PDF reader: Times, Helvetica and Courier. Each run is mapped to whichever is closest to the font the document named, so a Calibri document becomes Helvetica and a Cambria one becomes Times. Nothing is embedded, which keeps the file small and means it opens the same way everywhere.

What about Chinese, Japanese, Arabic or Cyrillic text?

Those do not survive. The built-in PDF fonts only cover the Latin-1 range, so any character outside it is replaced with a question mark and reported after the conversion. Latin-script languages, including Indonesian, English and every Western European language, convert in full.

Can it open a .doc file?

No. The old .doc format is a binary format with nothing in common with .docx, which is a ZIP of XML. Open the file in Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs and save it as .docx first.