What Word to PDF keeps and drops
Word to PDF is the right tool for a letter or notes when you do not want to hand the file to a server. It is the wrong tool for a designed brochure, a contract with a logo, or a document in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean.
What is read from the DOCX
Only .docx is accepted. An old .doc file has to be saved as a Word Document (.docx) first. A Google Doc has to be downloaded as .docx. A share link is not a file this page can read.
The document is unzipped in the browser and the paragraph text is read from word/document.xml. Bold and italic runs use Helvetica Bold and Helvetica Oblique. A page break in the document starts a new PDF page. The page size is US Letter with a plain margin.
There is no font upload. The PDF font is the standard Helvetica built into the PDF library. Latin text, including accents such as é, usually works.
What is dropped
- Tables become a series of paragraphs, not a grid.
- Images are ignored.
- Headers, footers, and page numbers live outside the main paragraph stream and are not copied.
- Some text boxes and SmartArt are missed because that text is not a normal paragraph.
- Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and many symbols become question marks. Helvetica has no glyphs for them. The status line counts the replaced characters. The DOCX itself is not modified.
When to use Word's own Save as PDF instead
If the recipient needs the original fonts, the logo, the table, or the page design, use Word's own Save as PDF, or the Mac Print dialog. Those tools embed the fonts and draw the layout. This page cannot.
The limit here is 80 pages. A longer document stops with a warning. Password protection is not added. The result is a simple PDF of the paragraphs, which you can then merge or split with the other PDF tools if you need to.
If characters became question marks, they were outside the Helvetica character set. Re-saving from Word is the fix. Raising a quality setting will not help, because this tool has no quality slider and no substitute font.
A letter versus a brochure
A one-page letter with three paragraphs, one bold sentence, and no picture is the case this tool is built for. You get a US Letter PDF, the bold sentence stays bold, and the italic stays italic. The margins are plain. It will not match a custom Word template, and it does not need to.
A brochure fails in a predictable way. The photo is gone. The two-column layout is gone. The table of prices is a run of paragraphs. A Chinese headline is a row of question marks, and the status line tells you how many characters were replaced. Sending that PDF to a client would be a mistake. Word's own Save as PDF is the file you send.
SmartArt and a text box used as a pull quote are the quiet failures. The body paragraphs convert, the pull quote never appears, and there is no warning that a specific box was skipped. If the DOCX uses text boxes for anything you must keep, do not use this page.
Questions
Why did Chinese text turn into question marks?
The built-in PDF font is Helvetica, which covers Western European letters. It has no CJK glyphs. The DOCX is not modified.
Can I convert Google Docs?
Download the Doc as .docx, then drop that file here. A share link cannot be read.
Does it keep headers and page numbers?
No. They are outside the paragraph stream and are not copied.