Convert Word to PDF — free & private
Turn your .docx, .rtf, or .odt documents into PDF right in your browser. Best for simple documents — CVs, letters, short reports. Preview shows exactly what you’ll get before you download. Have a legacy .doc file? Save it as .docx in Word first — then drop it here.
How to convert Word to PDF online
Converting a DOCX into a PDF with PDFluna takes under a minute and runs entirely in your browser. There is nothing to install and no account to create. Here is the full process:
- Choose your Word document. Drag and drop your file onto the upload area, or click Choose document to pick one. PDFluna accepts three modern Word-family formats: .docx (Word 2007 and later), .rtf (Rich Text Format), and .odt (OpenDocument Text from LibreOffice or Google Docs). If you have a legacy .doc file, open it in Word first and Save As .docx — then drop the .docx here.
- Review the live preview. PDFluna parses the document and shows a preview of the exact pages that will go into your PDF. If something looks off — a table is broken, a footer is missing — you see it BEFORE downloading, so you never get a surprise.
- Pick a paper size. Choose A4 (international standard) or US Letter. We trust the document’s own margins, fonts, and orientation — the paper size is the only decision you need to make.
- Click Download as PDF. The preview is rasterised at high DPI and packaged into a multi-page PDF in your browser. A progress bar shows each page as it is built. The finished file downloads automatically.
- Verify the result. Open the PDF to confirm it matches the preview. For email attachments, CVs, and simple letters it is ready to send. For complex layouts with merged tables or footnotes, compare against the preview and fall back to the source app’s built-in Save as PDF if you spot issues.
What works well and what doesn’t
Most online Word-to-PDF tools promise perfection, and their users discover the issues only after downloading. We prefer to tell you upfront what to expect. Our client-side pipeline handles the common 70% of documents cleanly and struggles on the complex edge cases — here’s where the line falls.
- ✓ Accepted formats.
.docx(Word 2007 and later),.rtf(Rich Text Format, written by WordPad, Word, LibreOffice, and almost every other word processor), and.odt(OpenDocument Text from LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Google Docs export). Three modern Word-family formats, all processed entirely in your browser. - ✓ Works well. Plain paragraphs and headings, bold / italic / underline formatting, bullet and numbered lists, single-cell tables, embedded images (DOCX only), single-column layouts, and explicit page breaks. CVs, cover letters, short memos, and the majority of work reports.
- ⚠ May have issues. Tables with merged cells, footnotes and endnotes, headers and footers, multi-column layouts, custom fonts the browser doesn’t have installed, embedded charts and SmartArt, and documents with tracked changes still pending review. RTF with complex tables often loses table structure; ODT with embedded images drops the images from preview.
- ✗ Not supported.
.doc(Word 97–2003 legacy binary) — the format is complex enough that producing acceptable PDF output requires either Microsoft Word or the full LibreOffice engine. Open your.docin Word or LibreOffice, use File → Save As → .docx, and drop the new file here — the DOCX pipeline preserves everything. Also not supported: password-protected files (remove the password first in the source app), macros and VBA, form fields, embedded Excel worksheets.
Tip. Always review the preview before downloading. If the preview shows a problem, the PDF will have the same problem — that’s not a bug, it’s the tool telling you that this particular document needs the source app’s built-in exporter instead.
When you need to convert Word to PDF
DOCX is the working format; PDF is the delivery format. The handoff between the two happens every day, and the motivation is usually one of these patterns:
- Job applications. Most corporate portals accept PDF only, and recruiters open PDFs faster because the formatting is guaranteed to match what you wrote.
- Contracts and legal agreements. PDF is tamper-evident and renders identically on every device, so it’s the default for anything that will be signed or archived.
- Academic submissions. University portals and conference management systems generally accept PDF only for theses, essays, and paper submissions.
- Government and visa forms. Many immigration and benefit applications require supporting letters in PDF form for archival.
- Email attachments. PDFs are smaller than DOCX for documents with images and display consistently on any phone or email client.
Already have a PDF and want to tweak it? Edit the resulting PDF, compress it for email, merge it with other files, or rotate pages if something came out sideways.
How PDFluna converts your document
Most online Word-to-PDF converters upload your file to a server running Microsoft Word or LibreOffice, convert it there, and send the PDF back. That round trip is slow on big documents, raises obvious privacy questions when the file is a contract or CV, and can fail silently if the server is under load. Our approach is the opposite: nothing leaves your browser.
When you drop a document, PDFluna picks the right parser for your file in-browser and produces structured HTML. For .docx, mammoth.js unzips the document and walks its XML — paragraphs, headings, lists, tables, and embedded images all recovered locally. For .rtf, a built-in RTF parser (no external library) walks the control-word stream and preserves bold, italic, underline, and heading sizes. For .odt, we extract the archive with fflate and transform the OpenDocument XML into the same HTML structure. The resulting HTML is rendered inside a sandboxed iframe with print-ready styling (A4 or Letter margins, serif body font, sensible heading sizes) so you see the page layout before committing. Then html2canvas rasterises the rendered iframe at 2× resolution for crisp output, and pdf-lib slices the tall canvas into page-sized chunks and assembles the final multi-page PDF. The finished file lands on your device as a direct browser download.
The honest trade-off: the output PDF carries images of your text, not the text itself. That means you cannot select or search text inside the PDF, and the file is a little larger than a true text-based PDF would be. For simple documents this is invisible to the reader; for archival or searchable records, the source app’s built-in Save as PDF (Word, WordPad, or LibreOffice) produces a text PDF that our client-side pipeline cannot match. We show the preview exactly as it will appear in the PDF so you can make that call before downloading.
Frequently asked questions
Is my Word document uploaded to your server?
No. The entire conversion — parsing the DOCX, rendering the HTML, rasterising to canvas, and assembling the PDF — runs in your browser with JavaScript. Your document never leaves your device. You can verify it yourself: open DevTools → Network before uploading and you’ll see zero requests that carry your file.
What’s the maximum file size?
Twenty megabytes. DOCX parsing is memory-heavy — the file has to be unzipped, its XML parsed, its images extracted, and the whole structure rendered to HTML before we can convert it. We hard-stop at 20 MB to avoid crashing the browser tab. Files between 10 and 20 MB show a warning that conversion may be slow on mobile.
Why can’t I select text in the output PDF?
Our client-side pipeline renders each page to a high-resolution image and embeds those images in the PDF. That preserves the visual layout exactly — but the text inside becomes part of the image, not a separate text layer. It won’t respond to Ctrl+F and can’t be copy-pasted. If you need searchable output, Microsoft Word’s built-in Save as PDF produces a text-based PDF; alternatively, convert with us and then run the result through our OCR tool (coming soon).
Why does my complex table look different from Word?
The underlying parser (mammoth.js) supports simple tables cleanly but struggles with merged cells, nested tables, and tables with variable row heights. We show the parsed HTML in the preview so you see the layout before downloading — if the preview looks wrong, the PDF will too. For complex tables, open the document in Word and use Save as PDF for exact preservation.
Which formats do you accept — .docx, .rtf, .odt? What about .doc?
Three modern formats: .docx (Word 2007 and later), .rtf (Rich Text Format, readable by every word processor), and .odt (OpenDocument Text, from LibreOffice / OpenOffice / Google Docs export). All three come through with basic formatting preserved — bold, italic, underline, headings, lists, simple tables. .doc files (the legacy Word 97–2003 binary format) are not supported: producing quality output from .doc requires either server-side Microsoft Word / LibreOffice or a very large legacy-format parser we deliberately choose not to ship in the browser. The ten-second workaround: open your .doc in Word or LibreOffice, File → Save As → .docx, and drop the new file here — everything carries over.
Does this work on mobile?
Yes, but with caveats. The conversion pipeline is memory-heavy, and large or complex documents (50+ pages, many embedded images) can crash the browser tab on older phones. For documents above 10 MB we recommend converting on a desktop. Simple CVs and letters convert fine on any modern phone.
Will fonts look the same as in Word?
Common fonts (Calibri, Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, Verdana) render faithfully because they’re installed on virtually every browser. Unusual or custom fonts are substituted with the closest system equivalent — the text stays readable but the look may shift slightly. For pixel-perfect font rendering, use Word’s Save as PDF, which embeds the original fonts.
What happens to comments and tracked changes?
Comments are stripped — they don’t appear in the output PDF. Tracked changes are rendered in their accepted (final) state, matching Word’s default Save as PDF behaviour. If you need the change-bar annotations in the PDF, turn off Track Changes in Word and export from there; our pipeline treats the document as you’d see it with changes accepted.