Word to PDF without uploading

What Word to PDF does, and when you need it

Word to PDF turns a Word document (a DOCX file) into a PDF that looks the same on every phone and computer and prints the same everywhere. The work happens inside your browser: your document is not uploaded, and there is no sign-up and no watermark.

A PDF is what most forms, offices and portals ask for, because nobody can change it by accident and it doesn't depend on the fonts the other person has. People use it for:

• Resumes and job applications. Job portals and recruiters ask for a PDF, so your layout can't shift on their computer.
• Letters and applications. Leave letters, requests to a bank, a school or an office, and complaints, in English, Hindi or your own language.
• Assignments and reports. College portals often take only PDFs, with headings, tables and page numbers kept.
• Office orders, notices and circulars. Written in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali or another Indian language, often with English words mixed in.
• Private documents. Agreements, statements and anything else you would rather not upload to a website you don't know.

Word itself can save a PDF (File > Save As, then PDF), and so can LibreOffice. This tool is for the times you don't have them at hand: on a phone, on someone else's computer, or when a document arrived on WhatsApp or by email and you only need it as a PDF.

Converting a Word file, step by step

1. Open this page in your phone's or computer's browser. There is nothing to install.
2. Tap Choose Word files and pick the document. If it came on WhatsApp or by email, download it to your phone first, then pick it from your files or downloads. On a computer you can also drop files onto the page.
3. Wait while it works. The document's row shows "Reading the document", then "Laying out page 12" and so on, then "Writing the PDF". A letter is done in a moment; long documents take some seconds (see the results below).
4. Press Download. The PDF gets your document's name: leave-letter.docx becomes leave-letter.pdf.
5. Read the row. It shows the number of pages, the size of your document and of the PDF, how long it took, and a note if anything in the document couldn't be drawn.

Several documents at once. Choose or drop them together. They are converted one after another, each with its own row and Download button, so memory stays low.

Changed your mind? While a document is being converted, its row has a Stop button. Stopping is immediate: in our tests the row showed "Stopped" 0.08 to 0.14 seconds after pressing Stop on a computer (three runs), and 0.3 seconds with the browser slowed down 4 times on a phone-sized screen. The other documents carry on.

Try it first. Press "Try with a sample document" at the top of this page. It makes a one-page Word document in your browser, with a table, lists, Hindi text and page numbers, and converts it. In our phone-sized tests it took 0.2 to 0.3 seconds and made a 33 KB PDF.

What happens on your device

A DOCX file is not a picture of pages. It holds the text, the styles (Normal, Heading 1 and so on) and settings such as margins and spacing, and Word works out where each line and page ends when it opens the file. That is why the same document can end on a different page on another computer, and why converting it is real work.

This tool does that work in your browser, in three steps you can watch on the row:

• Reading. A DOCX file is really a zip file. The tool opens it and reads the text, styles, lists, tables, pictures, headers, footers and footnotes.
• Laying out. It measures every word with the letter widths of a real font, fills each line, and fills each page, following the rules a Word document is written for: the space before and after paragraphs, line spacing, keeping a heading with the paragraph after it, not leaving one line of a paragraph alone at the top or bottom of a page, and repeating a table's header row.
• Writing. It writes the PDF itself, with the fonts inside it, so the PDF looks the same everywhere, and with real text you can search and copy.

The work runs in the background (in what browsers call a web worker), so the page itself stays free. In every one of our test runs, no task on the page took longer than 50 milliseconds, even while the 129-page book was converted. That is why the progress bar keeps moving and Stop answers at once.

The page downloads only what it needs. Opening it downloads about 0.09 MB. The converter (about 0.07 MB) comes when you add your first document, and fonts come only when a document uses them. What a first document downloaded in our tests, converter included, at the size this site sends the files:

• a leave letter in Times New Roman: about 0.16 MB,
• a resume in Calibri: about 0.2 MB,
• a Tamil notice: about 0.41 MB,
• a Hindi office order with English words: about 0.54 MB, because Hindi needs HarfBuzz (about 0.2 MB) and its own fonts.

Fonts: why the letters look a little different

Word's fonts, such as Calibri, Times New Roman and Arial, belong to Microsoft and can't be shared on a website. So each one is drawn with an open font made to have exactly the same letter widths. Every word takes the same room as with Word's font, so lines and pages can break in the same places, while the shapes of the letters differ slightly.

A style is regular, bold, italic or bold italic, and only the styles a document uses are downloaded: our leave letter in Times New Roman needed three fonts, 93 KB together. The PDF then carries only the letters it uses from each font, which keeps it small: the leave letter's PDF is 13 KB.

Other fonts get the closest of these. Verdana, Tahoma, Helvetica and similar plain fonts are drawn with Arial's widths; Georgia, Garamond, Book Antiqua and other fonts with small feet on their letters with Times New Roman's; Consolas with Courier New's. A font it doesn't know gets Calibri's widths, unless the document says it is a serif or fixed-width font. These fonts are different widths from the real ones, so in a document that uses them, lines can break in other places than in Word, and a fancy font looks plainer.

Aptos, the font newer versions of Word start with, is drawn with Calibri's widths too. Aptos is wider, so a document in Aptos may fit more words on each line here, and can end up shorter than in Word.

Hindi and eight more Indian scripts

Indian scripts need more than letter widths. Letters join into conjuncts, vowel signs sit before, above or below the letter they belong to, and what you see is not always in the order it was typed. Word does this with Windows fonts such as Mangal, Latha and Nirmala UI. This tool does it with HarfBuzz, the text engine used by Chrome, Firefox, Android and LibreOffice, and with Noto Sans, Google's open fonts for every script. Both are downloaded only when a document has such text: HarfBuzz once (about 0.2 MB), and the fonts for each script it uses.

The download is regular and bold together. Nirmala UI, which has every Indian script, is replaced too: its Indian text is drawn with the Noto font for the script, and its English with Calibri's widths.

How we tested it. Each school notice has a bold heading, justified paragraphs, English words in brackets, the script's own digits or ordinary ones, a table and a page number at the bottom. We copied the text back out of each PDF with two different PDF readers (Poppler, and PDFium, the one inside Chrome): every paragraph and every table cell came out word for word, in all eight notices and in our two Hindi documents. We also converted each notice with LibreOffice, using the same Noto fonts, and compared the pages (see compared with LibreOffice). Other languages in these scripts, such as Marathi, Nepali or Assamese, use the same fonts and engine, but we didn't test them on their own.

Your text must be Unicode. Phones, Google's Indic keyboards and the Indian keyboards in Windows all type Unicode, so most documents are. Older documents typed in fonts like Kruti Dev, DevLys, Chanakya or Bamini are not: they hold English letters that only look Indian in that one font, so in a PDF they come out as English letters. The row tells you when a document uses such a font. Change the text to Unicode first (a "Kruti Dev to Unicode" converter does it), or retype it in Mangal or Nirmala UI.

Indian text in bold is drawn bold. Indian text in italics is drawn upright, because the Noto fonts for these scripts have no italic style.

Real results from our tests

We converted these documents in Chrome on our test computer, one after another, in 3 to 8 runs each (at computer and phone screen widths). Times are the ones the page showed on each row; where runs differed, you see the range. They include reading the fonts from our test server, which was on the same computer, so on a slow connection your first document also waits for its fonts. Your device may be faster or slower.

• 0.1 to 0.2 sfor a one-page leave letter
• 1.8 to 2.2 sfor a 129-page book with tables and pictures
• 8.2 sfor the same book with the processor slowed down 4 times
• 0 bytessent to any server

The score out of 100 says how much of the print on each page lands within 1.5 mm of where LibreOffice put it, averaged over the pages. The next section explains the comparison.

On a slower device. Chrome can slow its processor down for testing; 4 times slower is roughly a mid-range phone. Chrome's slowing reaches only the page, not the background, so for this test we ran the same converter on the page itself. A one-page letter took 0.5 to 0.7 seconds, the resume 0.6, the two-page offer letter 0.6, the Hindi office order 0.7, the Tamil notice 0.5, the 6-page report 0.9 and the 129-page book 8.2 seconds. That is a test on a computer, not on a real phone, so your phone may differ either way.

Memory. In the computer test, the browser as a whole used 429 MB when the page was ready and at most 611 MB while it converted ten documents one after another, the 129-page book among them. A phone has less memory than a computer, so a very long document full of big photos is where a phone is most likely to give up.

How close is it? Compared with LibreOffice, not Word

We couldn't test against Microsoft Word itself, because we don't have it on our test computers. So we compared with LibreOffice, a free office program that also lays out Word documents. We converted the same 23 test documents with both and compared the PDFs page by page: the five everyday documents in the table above, written the way recent versions of Word write their files; ten more made with a program or from LibreOffice's own templates, the report and the book among them; and the eight Indian notices. LibreOffice isn't Word either, so this shows how close two separate converters come, not that the result is the same as Word's.

• The same number of pages for 22 of the 23 documents. For the 129-page book, 127 pages start with the same line in both.
• 98.7 to 100 out of 100 for the five everyday documents. The resume, offer letter, leave letter, admission form and Hindi office order. In the Hindi one, every line held the same words as in LibreOffice and sat within 1.5 mm of it.
• 95.9 to 100 for five of the eight Indian notices. Bengali 99.9, Gujarati 100, Odia 100, Tamil 99.1 and Malayalam 95.9.
• 98.9 to 100 for four of the other ten. A letter, a form, a CV from a LibreOffice template, and the book.

Where the two differed, from the closest to the furthest:

• The report, 92.6. LibreOffice draws its chart; this tool shows a grey box.
• Punjabi 89.4, Kannada 85.5, Telugu 77.3. A few lines broke one word earlier or later than in LibreOffice, mostly lines with English words in brackets, so the lines after them sat a few millimetres higher or lower. The words were all there and in order.
• A Hindi letter, 84.1. LibreOffice drew it with a different Hindi font, whose letters take different room. The Hindi office order scored 83.6 the same way, and 99.6 once LibreOffice had the same Noto font.
• A resume made with a program, 82.4. The file gives two different widths for a table's columns. This tool used one and LibreOffice the other, so a college name fit on one line here and took two there, moving everything below it.
• A newsletter in two columns, 74.4: 3 pages here, 2 in LibreOffice. The file, made by a program, leaves out how its line spacing is meant to be measured. The two read that differently, and this tool's lines came out further apart.
• Two documents from LibreOffice's templates, 63 each. The business letter uses Noto Sans, a font that doesn't come with Word, which this tool draws with Arial's narrower widths. The one-page resume has columns of different widths that end part-way down the page, which this tool spreads less exactly than LibreOffice. Both still came out on 1 page.

What this means for you: everyday documents in Word's usual fonts came out on the same pages as in LibreOffice, with their lines in nearly the same places. Before you send something important, open the PDF and look through it, as you would with any converter.

What converts

• Text: fonts, sizes, bold, italic, underline, colours, highlighting, capitals, letter spacing, line spacing, alignment, indents and tab stops with dotted leaders.
• Lists: bullets and numbers, several levels deep, numbered the way Word numbers them, including i., ii., iii. and a), b), c).
• Tables: borders, shading, merged cells, cell spacing and alignment, rows that go over to the next page, and header rows repeated on each page.
• Pictures: JPG and PNG pictures in the text, or placed on the page with text around them, see-through signatures, text boxes and simple shapes.
• Pages: page sizes and margins, portrait and landscape sections, columns, page breaks, headers and footers (with a different first page when the document asks for one), page numbers such as "Page 3 of 10", and footnotes.
• Tick boxes in forms, ticked or not.
• Links and headings: links keep working, and headings become the PDF's bookmarks, so a long document is easy to move around in.

Notes under a result, and what to do

When something in a document can't be drawn, the PDF is still made, and the row says what is different. The notes you may see:

• A chart or SmartArt diagram shown as a grey box. In Word, copy the chart, paste it as a picture (Paste Special, then Picture), save, and convert again.
• An equation written as plain text. The letters and numbers are there, without fraction bars or root signs. Pasting the equation as a picture in Word fixes it too.
• Pictures in a format a PDF can't hold, shown as grey boxes. These are EMF and WMF drawings, an older Windows format. Save them as PNG pictures in the document.
• Text in a script this tool can't draw yet, such as Urdu or Sinhala: it shows as empty boxes.
• An older Indian font such as Kruti Dev: its text comes out as English letters. See Hindi and eight more Indian scripts.

And when a document can't be converted at all:

• "An older Word file (.doc)". In Word, choose File > Save As > Word Document (.docx), then convert the new file.
• "Locked with a password". Open it in Word, remove the password (File > Info > Protect Document), save, and try again.
• "Couldn't be read as a Word document". The file may be damaged, or another kind of file renamed to .docx. Try downloading it again.
• "The fonts couldn't be downloaded". Check your internet connection and add the document again.
• "The converter stopped". The document may be too big for the device's memory. Close other tabs and apps, or use a computer.

Word to PDF on Android, iPhone, Windows and Mac

The converter runs in your web browser, so there is nothing to install: no app, no extension and no account.

• Android

  Open this page in Chrome or another up-to-date browser and tap Choose Word files. The PDF goes to your Downloads folder, ready to share on WhatsApp or upload to a portal.

• iPhone and iPad

  Open this page in Safari or Chrome and pick the document from the Files app. Downloads usually go to Downloads in the Files app.

• Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebook

  Use an up-to-date browser. Drop Word files onto the page, or choose them. The PDFs go to your Downloads folder.

We ran our tests in Chrome on a computer, with the screen set to a 1280-pixel computer width and to 390- and 320-pixel phone widths. We didn't test on real phones, or in Safari or Firefox. Keep the page open with the screen on until a long document finishes, because browsers slow down or pause pages you aren't looking at.

Private by design

Most online Word to PDF converters work by uploading. Your document goes to their server, it is converted there, and you download the PDF back. For that time your document sits on a computer you don't control, and you have to trust that it is deleted afterwards.

NoUploadPDF works the other way round. Your own browser reads the document and writes the PDF, on your phone or computer. Your document and the PDF never leave your device, and the page is not allowed to send data to any other website. What it downloads from this site are the converter and the free fonts, never anything about your file. In every test run we checked each request the page made: none left this site, and none sent anything.

That matters for a resume with your phone number and address, an offer letter with your salary, an agreement, or an application with your Aadhaar or PAN number. The PDF records the document's title if it has one, NoUploadPDF as the program that made it, and the date. It doesn't copy the author's name from the Word file.

You can check all this yourself: open your browser's network panel while converting, and you'll see that nothing is uploaded. Our privacy policy has the details.

The open-source fonts and parts it uses

Word to PDF's layout and PDF writing are our own, and it stands on these open-source projects. Their licences let anyone use and share them, and each licence is on this site:

• Carlito and Caladea, with Calibri's and Cambria's widths, under the SIL Open Font License (Carlito licence, Caladea licence).
• Liberation Sans, Serif and Mono, with Arial's, Times New Roman's and Courier New's widths, under the SIL Open Font License (licence).
• Noto Sans for Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, by Google, under the SIL Open Font License (licence).
• DejaVu Sans for bullets and symbols, under its own free licence (licence).
• HarfBuzz, under its own free licence (licence), as built for browsers by the harfbuzzjs project, under the MIT licence (licence).

Limits

• Older Word files (.doc) and documents locked with a password can't be read yet. In Word, save them as a DOCX without a password first.
• Charts and SmartArt are shown as grey boxes, equations as plain text, and EMF and WMF drawings as grey boxes.
• Urdu and other right-to-left text, Sinhala, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Tibetan aren't drawn yet. Text typed in old fonts like Kruti Dev comes out as English letters, and Indian text in italics is drawn upright.
• Fonts other than Word's usual ones are drawn with the closest open font, so a document in a fancy font looks plainer and its lines may break in other places.
• A table of contents, a date or another field shows what Word saved in the file. Only page numbers are worked out again, so if pages break differently here, a table of contents can be off by a page.
• The layout was compared with LibreOffice, not with Microsoft Word. Complex layouts, such as text wrapped tightly around odd shapes, may come out a little different from Word.
• Long documents with many big photos need a lot of memory; on a phone, a computer may do better.