Word to PDF without losing your formatting

Everyone has converted a Word document to PDF. The interesting part is not how, it is why the result sometimes has a heading on its own at the bottom of page two, a table that has grown an extra column of white space, and a font nobody chose.

Why convert at all

Because a .docx does not describe a finished page — it describes intentions, and each program that opens it works out the layout for itself. Word on Windows, Word on a Mac, Google Docs and LibreOffice all produce slightly different results from the same file, and if the recipient lacks one of your fonts they see a substitute.

A PDF describes the finished page. Every character has a position, the fonts travel inside the file, and it looks the same on every device. That is the whole value, and it is why anything going to a client, an employer or a printer should be a PDF. Why a PDF can still look different on another computer covers the exceptions.

The three routes

Word's own export

If you have Word open, this is the most faithful option there is, because it is Word rendering its own document. Save as PDF, or Export, and take it. Nothing else can match it exactly for the simple reason that everything else is a different layout engine.

In the browser

For when you do not have Word to hand — someone emailed you a .docx, you are on a phone, or you are on a borrowed machine and installing an office suite to convert one file is absurd. Word to PDF unzips the document and rebuilds it inside your browser: styles, theme colours and fonts, direct formatting, tables with borders and shading, lists, images, headers and footers with working page numbers, and the page size and margins the document itself specifies.

Upload-based converters

These generally run a real office suite on a server, which produces good results. What you are trading for that is a copy of your document sitting on someone else's machine — fine for a flyer, a decision worth making consciously for an employment contract or an unsigned NDA. Are online PDF tools safe is about exactly this trade.

What goes wrong: fonts

The single biggest cause of a converted document not matching. A .docx names its fonts; it does not contain them. If the converting machine lacks a font, something else is used, and the replacement has different letter widths — so lines wrap in different places, and everything after that point moves.

The fix for this is metric-compatible substitutes: fonts designed to have identical letter widths to the ones they stand in for, so the text occupies exactly the same space even though the shapes differ slightly. Carlito stands in for Calibri and Caladea for Cambria, which between them cover the overwhelming majority of Word documents, because those two have been the default fonts for years.

A document built on something unusual — a bought font, a brand font, something downloaded — will not look identical anywhere it is not installed. If you need a guarantee, export the PDF on the machine that has the fonts.

What goes wrong: line breaks

No two layout engines wrap and justify text identically. They differ on hyphenation, on how much they will squeeze a space, on where a paragraph is allowed to break. Over a long document these accumulate, and by page ten you may be a line adrift.

This is normally invisible and occasionally infuriating, when it strands a heading at the foot of a page or breaks a table across two. If exact pagination matters, check the PDF rather than assuming, and use explicit page breaks in the Word document rather than rows of empty paragraphs — a page break means the same thing to every engine, and eight blank lines does not.

What does not survive anywhere

• Tracked changes and comments. A PDF is a finished document. Accept or reject first, and check — sending a PDF with markup still showing is a classic.
• The old .doc format. It is binary, predates 2007, and no browser can read it. Open it in Word, Google Docs or LibreOffice and save as .docx first.
• Images linked from a website rather than embedded. Your browser will not fetch someone else's files on your behalf, so they will be missing.
• Windows metafile images — EMF and WMF, which is what Word produces when you paste certain diagrams. No browser can draw them. Re-save those as PNG in Word.
• Interactive form fields, unless you specifically want a fillable PDF, which is a different job — Fill PDF Form handles the other direction.

Before you send it

1. 1Open the PDF and look at every page. It takes a minute and catches almost everything.
2. 2Check the last page for content that has slipped onto it.
3. 3Check the fonts look right, particularly headings.
4. 4Check the metadata. Word writes your registered name into the author field, which for a CV built from someone else's template is a real problem.
5. 5If it is going by email and it is large, compress it rather than hoping.

Common questions

Does my formatting survive?

Yes, in the sense that matters. A .docx states its own appearance — page size, margins, styles, fonts, theme colours, table rules, shading — and all of that is read out of the file and rebuilt. Bold, colours, alignment, indents, line spacing, numbered and bulleted lists, tables with merged cells, embedded images, headers and footers, and hard page breaks all come across. Where lines break is the thing that will not match exactly.

Can I convert a PDF back to Word?

You can, and it is a genuinely harder problem in that direction — a PDF has positioned characters rather than paragraphs, so the structure has to be inferred. PDF to Word does it, and the guide to it is honest about what to expect.

Why is my PDF so much bigger than the Word file?

Embedded fonts, usually. A .docx names its fonts and a PDF carries them, which can add a few hundred kilobytes. Images are the other cause: Word may be displaying a large photograph at postcard size, and the full-resolution original goes into the PDF.

Can I set the page size?

It defaults to whatever the document specifies, including orientation and each of the four margins, because that is what the author decided. A4, US Letter and Legal are available as overrides along with a uniform margin.

Is my document uploaded?

No. The .docx is unzipped and rendered inside your browser and the PDF is written there too, so nothing leaves the device. That is the reason to use it for anything confidential.