Word to PDF

Convert Word to PDF online, free and simple

Sending someone a Word file can be risky. Fonts change, tables move, and the page can look completely different on another computer. A PDF locks your work in place, so everyone sees exactly what you made. PDFMingo's Word to PDF converter turns your .doc or .docx file into a clean, professional PDF in a few seconds.

The conversion runs on our own secure server using a professional document engine, so your fonts, images, tables, headers and footers come through the way you set them. Your file is sent over an encrypted connection (HTTPS), converted, and deleted from our server immediately after your download is ready. We never store, log or share it. There is no sign-up and no watermark; files up to 20 MB are supported.

When should you convert Word to PDF?

Save your Word document as a PDF whenever the layout matters: a resume or CV you are sending to a company, an invoice for a client, a school assignment, a contract, a letter or a report. A PDF cannot be edited by accident, opens on every phone and computer without Microsoft Word, and always prints the way it looks on screen. If you ever need to go the other way, our PDF to Word tool turns a PDF back into an editable document.

Why fonts are the thing that usually breaks

Nearly every "my document looks wrong on their computer" story is a font story. A Word file does not contain its fonts, it only names them, so if the person opening it does not have the typeface you used, their software quietly swaps in something else. Line breaks move, a one-page CV becomes two, and a carefully aligned table stops lining up. A PDF works the other way round: the fonts travel inside the file. Once your document is converted, the letterforms are baked in, and the layout is identical on a recruiter's laptop, a phone, or a printer in another country.

Our converter keeps a broad font library on the server precisely for this reason, so common document fonts are matched properly rather than approximated. If a document uses something genuinely unusual, the nearest available face is substituted, which is the same thing Word itself would do on a machine without that font.

Details this converter handles that catch people out

• Tracked changes. Editing marks are resolved before conversion: insertions are kept, deletions are dropped. Your PDF shows the finished document, not a page covered in coloured revision marks. This is worth knowing, because sending a contract with visible tracked changes is a genuinely awkward mistake.
• Watermarks. Word text watermarks such as DRAFT or CONFIDENTIAL are commonly lost by conversion engines. Ours puts them back, so a document marked as a draft still reads as a draft.
• Headers, footers and page numbers. These are part of the page layout and carry through, including different first-page headers.
• Every output is checked. The finished PDF is validated before it is offered to you, so a conversion that went wrong fails visibly rather than handing you a broken file.

Getting a clean result first time

A few minutes in Word saves a reconversion. Check where your page breaks fall, since a stray break is much more obvious once the layout is frozen. If you are sending a CV, look at whether it still ends where you want it to. Make sure images are properly anchored rather than floating loosely, because loosely positioned pictures are the most likely thing to shift. And if the document is password-protected, remove the password before uploading, as an encrypted file cannot be opened for conversion.

Which files you can convert

Word documents in both the modern .docx format and the older .doc format, plus OpenDocument .odt files from LibreOffice or OpenOffice and .rtf rich text files, up to 20 MB each. The finished PDF downloads with _PDFMingo added to your original filename, so you can tell it apart from the source document in your downloads folder.