Convert Word to PDF

Convert a .docx Word document into a paginated PDF in your browser. No upload, no account, nothing sent to a server. Free and private.

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Drop your file here (.docx)

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Rasterized pages, and the trade this converter makes

There is no print engine you can call from a web page. Browsers keep pagination for their own print dialog, so any converter that promises a .docx to PDF conversion without touching a server has to lay the document out itself and then photograph the result. That is exactly what happens here. Your Word file is unzipped and its structure rebuilt as HTML, that HTML is laid out inside a hidden iframe, the iframe is captured to a canvas, and the canvas is cut into page-sized strips that become the PDF’s pages.

The consequence is unavoidable and you should weigh it before converting: the finished PDF contains pictures of your document, not its text. Nothing selects, nothing searches, no fonts are embedded because none are needed. What you gain is that the file never leaves your machine, there is no queue, no watermark and no size ceiling beyond your own memory. If you want the text to stay text, Convert Word to HTML shares the entire first half of this pipeline and stops right before the camera comes out.

794 pixels wide, sliced every 1123

The numbers are worth spelling out, because they explain most of the surprises. A4 portrait is 595.28 by 841.89 PDF points, and the layout iframe is sized to match at the standard 96-pixels-per-inch ratio, giving 794 CSS pixels of width. The stylesheet applied to your document sets a 40 pixel body margin on each side, so your actual text column is 714 pixels across. Choose US Letter instead and the iframe becomes 816 pixels wide, and A4 landscape widens it to 1123.

Once the whole document is captured as one tall image, the slicing begins. On A4 portrait at standard quality each PDF page takes 1123 pixels of that image. A document that renders 3000 pixels tall therefore becomes three pages holding 1123, 1123 and 754 pixels. Those cuts are pure arithmetic on the pixel height, with no idea where your paragraphs or table rows start, which is precisely why a line occasionally gets sheared across a page break.

Four steps and three choices

  1. Drop your .docx file into the box above, or click Choose a file to pick it.
  2. Set Page size to A4 or US Letter, and Orientation to Portrait or Landscape.
  3. Set Quality to Standard for a faster, smaller file or High for a sharper one.
  4. Click Convert Word to PDF, then download the finished file.

What survives the trip, and what was gone before the capture

Everything the structural conversion recognises makes it into the picture: headings at their proper sizes, bold and italic runs, strikethrough, superscript, nested bulleted and numbered lists, hyperlinks in blue, tables with visible one-pixel cell borders, and embedded images scaled to fit the column. Footnotes survive too, though not where you left them, they are collected into a numbered list at the very end of the document rather than sitting at the foot of each page.

What is missing was already missing before the rasterizing step. Underline, highlight, font colour and font size are not carried across by the structural conversion. Headers, footers and page numbers live in Word parts that are never opened, so nothing on the page will echo your original running headers. Columns, text boxes and precise spacing are gone for the same reason. For a report, a letter, a CV or a contract that is a fair trade. For a designed newsletter it is not.

When exporting from Word itself is the better answer

If you have Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs open in front of you and the layout is the point, use their own export. They have the real typesetting engine, they will embed your fonts, they will keep your headers and footers, and their text stays selectable. This tool earns its place in the other cases: you are on a machine with no Office suite, the document is confidential enough that a free upload site is out of the question, or you want a fixed visual snapshot that nobody can reflow.

Related routes on this site: Convert HTML to PDF uses this exact rendering path on an .html file you already have, OCR PDF will add a searchable text layer to whatever comes out of here, and Merge PDF Files stitches several converted documents into one. The rest of the PDF toolset is on the PDF tools hub.

Frequently asked questions

Will I be able to select or copy text out of the finished PDF?

No. Each page of the PDF is a JPEG image of the rendered document, so the words are pixels rather than glyphs. Nothing will highlight, Ctrl+F will find nothing, and a screen reader gets nothing. This is the honest cost of doing the whole job in a browser tab with no print engine available, and it is the single most important thing to know before you convert a document you plan to search later.

I need searchable text in the PDF. What is the shortest route?

Two options. Convert the same document with this site's Word to HTML tool, which stops before the rasterizing step and keeps every word real, then print that HTML to PDF from your browser. Or convert here and then run the result through the OCR PDF tool, which reads the page images and lays an invisible text layer over them so the PDF becomes searchable and copyable again.

Why did a line of text get cut in half across two pages?

The renderer captures your whole document as one tall image and then slices it into page-height strips. Those cuts happen at fixed pixel offsets with no awareness of where lines, paragraphs or table rows begin, so a line sitting exactly on a boundary is split between the bottom of one page and the top of the next. Shortening a paragraph or switching from A4 to US Letter shifts every boundary and usually clears it.

What does the Quality setting change?

It doubles the capture resolution. Standard rasterizes at one device pixel per CSS pixel, which for A4 portrait means a page image roughly 794 pixels wide. High rasterizes at two, giving about 1588 pixels across, so small type and thin table rules look noticeably crisper when zoomed or printed. The file gets substantially bigger and the capture takes longer, so leave it on Standard for screen reading.

Can I queue several documents and convert them together?

Not here, this tool takes one .docx at a time. Convert them one after another and then combine the finished files with this site's Merge PDF tool, which does accept several PDFs at once and keeps them in the order you add them. That also lets you drop in cover pages or appendices that were never Word documents.

Is my document handed to a rendering service somewhere?

No. The Word file is unzipped, converted, laid out, captured and written into a PDF entirely inside your browser tab. The layout step happens in a hidden iframe with scripting switched off at the sandbox level, so even a maliciously crafted document cannot run anything, and no bytes are transmitted for any of it.

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