Word to PDF

A PDF looks the same everywhere: on a phone, on a Mac, on paper. Nobody needs Word to open it, and the layout can't shift. That's why resumes, proposals, contracts, school papers and applications usually go out as PDFs.

Most online converters upload your document to their server. Kitpebble does the whole docx to pdf job in your browser instead: the file is read, laid out and saved as a PDF on your own device. There's no account, no watermark, and nothing for a third party to store, which matters for pay stubs, medical forms and anything under NDA.

The converter reads the structure of your document rather than taking a picture of it, so the PDF text stays selectable and searchable.

• Text formatting: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, colors, highlights, superscript and subscript, small caps, alignment, indents, line and paragraph spacing.
• Headings become PDF bookmarks for quick navigation.
• Lists: bulleted and numbered, multi-level, with Word's own numbering (1., a), i., 1.1).
• Tables: column widths, borders, shading, merged cells. Header rows repeat at the top of every page a table runs onto.
• Images in place, with their proportions kept.
• Headers and footers, including page-number fields like "Page 3 of 12".
• Links: web links stay clickable, and internal links such as a table of contents jump to the right page.
• Footnotes and endnotes, numbered at the end of the document.
• Page size and margins from the document, including landscape sections.

Your browser can't use the Calibri, Times New Roman or Arial installed on your computer, and those fonts can't be freely embedded anyway. The PDF uses the DejaVu Sans family, which covers accented and special characters in most Latin, Greek and Cyrillic languages.

DejaVu Sans runs wider than most Office fonts, so Keep line breaks close to the original scales the text to the width of your original font. Lines and pages then break about where they do in Word. Turn it off if you'd rather have slightly larger type and don't mind a longer document.

The result is very close to the original, but not a pixel-perfect copy. If the typeface itself matters, such as in a brand guide, Word's own Save as PDF is the better choice.

A few Word features can't be reproduced in the browser, and you'll see a short note when one is skipped.

• Charts and SmartArt are left out. In Word, copy the chart and use Paste Special → Picture, then convert again.
• EMF/WMF drawings (older Office graphics) are left out too; pasted as pictures, they come through.
• Equations appear as plain italic text, without fraction bars or radicals.
• Text boxes and shapes keep their text, but it flows with the page instead of floating in place.
• Comments are not shown; tracked changes appear as if accepted.
• Old .doc files need to be saved as .docx first. For a password-protected file, remove the password and save it again.

• Use heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2) instead of manual bold; they become your bookmarks.
• Mark table header rows to repeat in Word (Table Properties → Row → Repeat as header row).
• Huge photos make huge PDFs. If the file ends up too large, run it through a PDF compressor.
• Sending several documents? Convert each one, then merge the PDFs into a single attachment.

For example, a 14-page grant proposal with a budget table, three photos and page numbers in the footer converts in a few seconds. The budget table's header shows up again on page two, and clicking a line in the table of contents jumps to that section.