What Word to PDF does — and its limits
Upload a .docx and the tool produces a PDF with real, selectable text, in your browser, without sending the document anywhere. It reads the Word file's structure — headings, paragraphs, bold and italic, bullet and numbered lists, tables, embedded images — and lays it out on A4 pages in a clean standard font. It does not reproduce Word's exact formatting: page margins, fonts, columns, headers and footers, text boxes and precise line breaks are simplified. For a print-faithful PDF, Word's own “Save as PDF” is still the right tool; this one is for a quick, private conversion when Word is not available.
What is carried over
| Word element | In the PDF |
|---|---|
| Headings 1–6 | Bold, at descending sizes |
| Body paragraphs | Paragraphs with spacing, word-wrapped to the page |
| Bold / italic | Preserved (Helvetica Bold / Oblique) |
| Bullet and numbered lists | Indented list items with bullets or numbers |
| Tables | Rows of text separated by bars — no borders or cell widths |
| Images | Embedded at up to page width |
| Page breaks | Not honoured — the text flows and breaks where the page fills |
| Fonts, colours, margins, columns, headers/footers, footnotes | Not reproduced |
How the conversion works
The .docx is first turned into clean HTML by mammoth, a library that maps Word styles to semantic elements rather than copying formatting. That HTML is then flowed onto PDF pages with pdf-lib: text is measured with the embedded font, wrapped at the margin, and written as vector text objects. Because the text is real, the PDF is searchable, copyable and small — a 20-page document is typically under 100 KB unless it contains images.
When this is the right tool
- You are on a phone, a Chromebook or a machine without Word and need a PDF now.
- The document is text-centric — a letter, an essay, minutes, a policy, a CV without heavy design.
- Privacy matters more than pixel-perfect layout; nothing leaves the browser.
- You want a PDF with selectable text rather than a screenshot.
When to use Word instead
- Designed documents: brochures, resumes with columns and colour, certificates.
- Anything where headers, footers, page numbers or footnotes must appear.
- Documents in scripts outside Latin (Thai, Chinese, Arabic) — the standard PDF fonts do not cover them; Word embeds the right font.
- Tables with merged cells or borders that carry meaning.
In Word: File → Save As → PDF, or File → Export. In Google Docs: File → Download → PDF. LibreOffice: File → Export as PDF. All of these are free and exact.