Convert DOC to PDF

People rarely convert a DOC because they want a PDF for its own sake. They convert it because something arrived in a format their computer no longer handles — a form from a council, a template from a university, a contract from a firm whose systems were configured a long time ago.

DOC is the Word format from 1997 to 2003. It is a single binary blob whose structure was never published in a usable way, which is why programs other than Word have always struggled with it and why it eventually got replaced. If you do not own Word, converting is frequently the only way to read the thing at all — and a PDF then opens on every phone, tablet and computer without further argument.

The single most common disappointment in any Word-to-PDF conversion is not missing content, it is shifted content: a document that was three pages becomes four, a table breaks across a page, a heading ends up alone at the bottom.

That is almost always fonts. The document names Calibri, Cambria or Times New Roman and does not contain them, so whatever renders it substitutes something else. Any substitute with different letter widths changes where every line wraps, and everything after that moves. The conversion here uses metric-compatible replacements — fonts drawn differently but measured identically — which is what keeps the pagination intact. It is a good defence and not a perfect one, which is the reason to open the PDF once before sending it anywhere that matters.

Most conversions on this site run entirely in your browser, and we make a point of it. This is not one of them. There is no browser-based reader for the legacy Word format that is good enough to trust with somebody’s contract, so this conversion runs on our own server.

What that means concretely: the file travels over an encrypted connection, LibreOffice converts it, the result comes back, and the working directory is deleted as soon as the PDF has been read — in a `finally` block, so it happens whether the conversion succeeded or failed. The machine has no route to the internet, so it could not send your document anywhere even if asked. No copy is kept and nobody reads it. Every conversion on this site says which of the two kinds it is, on the button, before you press it.

Should you have access to any version of Word, or to LibreOffice, opening the DOC and saving it as DOCX before converting gives a better result. The modern format is a ZIP of XML with a published specification, and everything downstream — including this converter — reads it more accurately than the binary original.

That is not usually possible, which is why this page exists. But when it is, it takes thirty seconds and removes a whole class of layout surprises.

The extension is the reliable indicator, and Windows hides it by default, which is how people end up on the wrong page. Turn on file extensions in the folder view, or open the file properties.

If it ends in .doc it is the binary format from 1997 to 2003 and belongs here. If it ends in .docx it is the modern ZIP-of-XML format, and the DOCX page converts it more accurately, because there is a published specification to follow.

Through: body text, paragraph styles, tables, images, headers and footers, page numbers, footnotes, and a table of contents.

Not through: macros, the behaviour of form fields, and the ability to edit. A DOC written in 2001 may also carry features that no longer have an equivalent anywhere, and those are dropped rather than approximated into something that looks similar.

The binary format has no published specification worth the name, so a file written by unusual software, or damaged in transit, can defeat any reader that is not Word itself.

A clear failure is the honest answer in that situation. A converter that produced a partial document from a file it did not understand would be worse, because you would have no way of knowing which parts to distrust.

A DOC protected with an opening password cannot be read without it, here or anywhere else. The conversion fails rather than guesses.

Documents carrying editing restrictions rather than an opening password are a different case. Those open normally, and the restriction simply stops mattering, because a PDF was never editable in that sense to begin with.

Drop a folder and take the results as a ZIP. Each file is handled on its own, so a single unreadable DOC does not stop the rest of them.

Since this runs on our server rather than in your browser, large batches are better sent in groups. Each file is deleted as soon as its PDF has been read back.