Convert Word to PDF online, free

Drop in a .docx, .doc, .odt, .rtf or .txt and get a PDF that still looks like the document you wrote. That sounds like the promise every converter makes, so here is the part that is actually measurable: a Word file carries the names of its fonts, not the fonts themselves, and what a converter does when it does not have them is the single biggest thing separating a faithful PDF from a document that merely contains the right words.

The font test any converter can be checked against

We tested a real file whose text was set in DejaVu Sans and Liberation Sans — two sans-serif fonts. The best-known converter on the internet rendered the whole thing in Times New Roman, a serif: every heading, every paragraph, every bullet, in a typeface the author never chose. This tool rendered it in the fonts the document asked for. That is a difference you can reproduce in two minutes with your own file.

Substitution by typeface kind, not by chance

The converter carries proper substitutes for the fonts Microsoft ships and Linux does not — Calibri, Cambria, Aptos, Segoe UI, Tahoma — matched by the kind of typeface each one is, so a humanist sans is replaced by a humanist sans and never by a serif. And if your document carries its own embedded fonts, using the "Embed fonts in the file" option in Word, they are used exactly, which makes the result pixel-identical with no substitute involved at all.

Arabic, Hebrew and Persian documents

This is where most converters fall apart completely. Five different Arabic fonts collapsing into one generic face is the normal result elsewhere, and Persian text has been known to arrive rendered in an Indian script font. Here Traditional Arabic and Simplified Arabic come back as Naskh, Arabic Typesetting as a calligraphic face, and Hebrew's David, Narkisim and Miriam as three genuinely different typefaces. Right-to-left text keeps its direction and its letter shaping.

What else survives

Colours come back exact. Bold, italic, underline, bullets, numbering, indentation, tables, headings and embedded charts all survive. The text stays selectable and searchable rather than being flattened into a picture — which is what makes a converted document useful for anything beyond looking at it.

Speed and batches

A 25-page document with tables and images converts in about half a second; a 321-page one in under four. Convert up to 10 documents in one request, 300 MB in total with no separate limit on any single file. One document comes back as a PDF; several come back as a ZIP with one PDF per document. Choose PDF/A instead if the file is going into an archive, and everything is deleted from the server an hour later.

What you get

• Your actual fonts, or substitutes matched by typeface kind — never a serif for a sans
• Embedded fonts used exactly, for a pixel-identical result
• Real right-to-left support for Arabic, Hebrew and Persian
• Selectable, searchable text — nothing flattened into an image
• Up to 10 documents and 300 MB per request, with PDF/A available
• No account, no watermark, and files deleted within an hour

What's next?

Spreadsheets and decks need different handling and have their own pages: Excel to PDF solves page layout for files nobody set up for printing, and PowerPoint to PDF deals with slide sizing. Archiving the result? Convert to PDF/A. And if the finished PDF is larger than you need, Compress PDF brings it down.