Word to PDF

How to use

1. In Word, if the file is .doc, use Save As and choose Word Document (.docx). This page will not open the old format.
2. Drop the .docx. If the file has tables or pictures, the status line says they were skipped or flattened.
3. Create the PDF. If some characters became ?, they were outside the standard Helvetica character set.

How the PDF is built

The document is unzipped in the browser and the paragraph text is read from word/document.xml. Bold and italic runs use Helvetica Bold and Helvetica Oblique. Page breaks in the document start a new PDF page. The page size is US Letter with a plain margin.

A table becomes a series of paragraphs, not a grid. Images are ignored. Text inside some text boxes and SmartArt is missed because it is not a normal paragraph. There is no font upload. If you need the original fonts and layout, use Word's own Save as PDF.

Latin text, including accents such as é, usually works. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and many symbols become question marks because the built-in PDF font cannot draw them. The count of replaced characters is shown after conversion. The DOCX itself is not modified. The limit is 80 pages.

A worked example

A two-page letter with headings in bold, a few italic titles, and no pictures comes out as a readable PDF: the words, the bold, the italic, and the page break. The letterhead image is missing. A footer with the page number is missing. That is expected.

The same letter with a Chinese address line shows question marks where those characters were. Save as PDF from Word or Google Docs if those characters matter. A Google Doc is not readable from a share link. Download it as .docx first, then drop that file here.

When not to use this

• The file is an old .doc, a .pages file, or a Google Docs link.
• The document is a brochure, a form, or anything where position matters.
• The text is Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. The built-in font cannot draw it.
• You need the file to look like Word's own export. Use Word.