DOCX Text to PDF Converter

Who it is for

Use it when you need the wording of a document in a format anybody can open — a note, a draft, a block of copy, a list of terms — and the appearance does not matter. If the document has to look like itself, stop here and read the section on exporting from a word processor instead.

How it works

1. The file name is checked for a .docx ending. That is the only check; anything else is refused with "Please select a .docx file".
2. The file is read into memory in the browser and its text is extracted paragraph by paragraph. Tab characters become four spaces.
3. A new PDF is created with A4-sized pages of 595 × 842 points. Text is drawn in 12-point Helvetica from a left margin of 40 points, on 16-point line spacing, wrapping at a line width of 515 points.
4. A fresh page is started whenever the text reaches the bottom margin, so 46 lines fit on each page. Paragraphs are separated by a blank line, so roughly 23 short paragraphs fill a page.
5. The finished PDF is saved and downloaded under the original file name with .pdf in place of .docx.

What is kept and what is not

Kept

• Every paragraph's text, in document order, including the text inside table cells.
• The separation between paragraphs, as one blank line.
• The characters of the Western Latin set, including accented letters such as é and ü, curly quotation marks, the em dash and fractions like ½.

Not kept

• All formatting: fonts, sizes, bold, italic, underline, colour and alignment. A Word heading arrives as an ordinary 12-point line.
• Bullet characters and list numbers. List items appear as plain lines with nothing in front of them.
• Table structure. Each cell becomes its own paragraph, so a three-column row arrives as three separate lines with no indication of which row or column they came from.
• Images, charts, shapes, diagrams and equations.
• Headers, footers, page numbers, margins, columns and the document's original page breaks.
• Footnotes, endnotes, comments, tracked changes and hyperlink targets — link text survives, the address does not.
• Any writing system outside that Latin range. Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Devanagari and even Polish letters such as ż and ł cannot be written with the built-in font. One such character anywhere in the document stops the whole conversion, and the page reports it with its general conversion error rather than naming the character.

When layout matters, export from the word processor

Every modern word processor can write a PDF itself, rendering the real pages with their fonts, images and tables intact. That is the right tool for a contract, an invoice, a CV, an assignment or anything a reader will judge by its appearance:

• Microsoft Word — File, then Save As or Export, choosing PDF as the file type.
• LibreOffice Writer — File, then Export as PDF.
• Google Docs — File, then Download, then PDF Document.
• Apple Pages — File, then Export To, then PDF.

Printing to a PDF printer driver does the same job. Any of these will also handle documents in scripts this page cannot write.

Common mistakes

• Renaming a .doc file to .docx. The name check passes, then the extraction fails, because the two formats are not the same thing inside.
• Expecting the PDF to be a copy of the Word page. It is a transcript, not a rendering.
• Converting a document with a table and assuming the columns survived. Read the output before sending it.
• Sending a password-protected or damaged file. Anything the page cannot read produces the same message: "Error converting the file. Please ensure it is a valid .docx document."
• Using it on a document with any non-Latin text. The conversion stops with a message rather than producing a PDF with missing characters.

Limits

• One file per conversion; there is no batch mode and no merging.
• DOCX only. Older .doc, .odt, .rtf and .pages files are not handled, and there is no PDF-to-Word direction.
• A single font at a single size, with no option to change the margin, the page size or the line spacing.
• A document with no extractable text — one made entirely of scanned page images, for instance — cannot be converted, and there is no character recognition to fall back on.
• Very large documents are limited by the memory your browser will give the tab.

Questions