Word to PDF
Turn a Word document into a PDF with the file staying on your machine. The document is unpacked and laid out here, then handed to your computer's own PDF writer — the result is a normal PDF with searchable, selectable text, not a picture of a page.
How to use it
- Drop a .docx onto the box above. The document appears as a preview, at the page size and margins it was written with.
- Check the preview — that is what will be printed, including where the page breaks fall.
- Press Save as PDF, then choose Save as PDF (or Microsoft Print to PDF on Windows) as the destination in the dialog.
Why it stays private
Conversion needs a layout engine, and every site that offers this service runs one on a server — which means your contract, your CV or your draft is sitting in someone's temporary storage. Here the layout is done by your own browser and the PDF is written by your own operating system. There is no upload code in the page, so there is nothing to trust and nothing to take on faith.
Questions
Why does it open a print dialog?
Because that is how a browser writes a PDF, and using it is deliberate: the dialog belongs to your own system, not to us, so the file is written straight to your disk with nothing in between. Choose Save as PDF as the destination — on Windows the entry is often called Microsoft Print to PDF. The output is a genuine PDF, so the text can be selected, searched and copied afterwards.
How faithful is the layout?
Paragraphs, headings, bold, italic, underline, colours, alignment, indentation, bullet and numbered lists, simple tables, pictures, page size and margins are reproduced. What can be simplified: text boxes and floating frames, multi-column sections, embedded charts or objects, and fields such as automatic cross-references. Fonts have to exist on this machine — if a document uses a font you do not have installed, a substitute is used and the line breaks will move slightly.
Can I convert a .doc file, or a Google Docs document?
A .doc has to be re-saved as .docx first (in Word: File → Save As → Word Document). Google Docs is easy: use File → Download → Microsoft Word (.docx), then drop that file here. A PDF that is itself only pictures of text cannot be made editable by this pair of tools — that needs OCR.