You can convert a Word document to PDF without Microsoft Word by opening Kopitiam's Convert to PDF tool, dropping in your .docx file, and clicking Convert & download PDF. The conversion runs in your browser, so the document is never uploaded, and you get a clean A4 PDF of its text a few seconds later.

There is one thing to know before you start. This is a text-faithful conversion, not a copy of how the page looks in Word. Your words, paragraphs, headings and bold or italic come across. The original layout, tables, columns and images do not. For a letter, an essay, meeting notes or a CV that is mostly text, that is often all you need. For a designed brochure it is not, and this post explains the better options.

Convert a .docx to PDF step by step

  1. Open Convert to PDF and drop your .docx file on the page, or click to choose it.
  2. Check the file name shown in the panel. Use Choose different files if you picked the wrong one.
  3. Click Convert & download PDF.
  4. The PDF downloads with the same name as your document, so "Offer letter.docx" becomes "Offer letter.pdf".
  5. Read the note under the button. It reminds you what was simplified, and lists any characters that could not be drawn.

Convert one Word file at a time. If you drop two .docx files, or a .docx together with photos, Kopitiam asks you to choose one kind and convert the other afterwards. Files it cannot convert, such as a spreadsheet, are skipped and named in a message.

What is kept and what is not

A .docx file is a bundle of pieces. Kopitiam reads the main body text and rebuilds it on fresh A4 pages with 2.5 cm (one inch) margins and word wrap. This is what comes across:

  • Every paragraph of the main text, in order, with tabs and line breaks.
  • Headings, in three sizes. Title and Heading 1 come out largest, Heading 2 next, and Heading 3 and lower share the third size. Body text is 11 point.
  • Bold and italic.
  • The text of links, though they are not clickable in the PDF.
  • Text inside tables, with each cell turned into its own paragraph.

And this does not:

  • Images, charts and shapes. They are left out entirely.
  • Table grids and columns. The cell text survives, but not the borders or side-by-side layout.
  • Your fonts, text colours, highlighting, underline and alignment. Everything is set in one plain font in near-black, aligned left.
  • Headers, footers, page numbers, footnotes and comments, which live outside the main body.
  • Bullets and list numbering. The text of each item stays, but the bullet or number is not added.
  • Page size and page breaks. Every PDF is A4, and a page break becomes an ordinary line break, so the page count can differ from Word.
Bold and italic are applied per paragraph. If one word in a sentence is bold, the whole paragraph comes out bold. If your document relies on bold words inside sentences, read through the PDF before you send it.

Fonts and non-Latin text

English, Malay and other Latin-script text is set in a standard PDF font that needs no download. Other scripts are handled too, which plenty of quick converters get wrong.

  • Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek and Russian come out as real, selectable text. Kopitiam downloads a matching Noto font from its own site only when your document needs it, and embeds just the characters you used.
  • Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Thai and similar scripts are shaped by your browser and placed as images of the text. They look right, but they cannot be selected or searched in the PDF.
  • Paragraphs that start in Arabic or Hebrew are aligned to the right.
  • Characters no available font can draw, often an emoji, show as a replacement symbol. The note after converting lists them, so you can remove or replace them in Word and convert again.

The tool keeps working if your connection drops after the page has loaded, with one exception. If your document needs one of those extra fonts and it cannot be downloaded, you see a message asking you to check your connection and try again. Only the font is downloaded. Your document is not sent anywhere.

Images: converting photos to PDF instead

Because images in a Word file are dropped, a document that is mostly photos, such as a scanned passport pasted into Word, will come out nearly empty. Kopitiam stops you if there is no text at all and says the document had no readable text to convert.

If what you really have is pictures, convert those directly. The same Convert to PDF page takes JPG and PNG images: drop one or several, pick a page size (Fit to image, A4 page or Letter page), and each image becomes one page of a single PDF. Photos in other formats need saving as JPG or PNG first.

When it goes wrong

  • "This Word file couldn't be read": the file may be damaged or not really a .docx. Open it in whatever made it and save a fresh copy.
  • You have an old .doc file: only .docx is accepted. Open it in Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs and save or download it as .docx, then convert that.
  • Your file is from Google Docs or Pages: download or export it as a Word document (.docx) first.
  • "This Word file is empty": the file has no content, often from a download that did not finish. Get the file again.
  • A table has turned into a long run of short lines: each cell became its own paragraph, read row by row. If the table matters, use one of the options below.

When not to use Kopitiam for this

If the PDF has to look exactly like the Word document, you need a converter that understands the full layout. A few free ways do this:

  • If you do have Word, use File, then Save As, and pick PDF.
  • LibreOffice Writer is free desktop software that opens .docx files and has Export as PDF. It runs on your own computer, so the file stays private.
  • Google Docs can open a .docx and download it as a PDF, but the file is uploaded to your Google account to do that.

Use one of those for brochures, flyers, invoices with a logo, CVs with a two-column design, reports full of tables or charts, and anything with letterhead in the header. Use Kopitiam when the words matter more than the design, when you are on a borrowed or locked-down computer with no Word, or when the document is too private to upload anywhere. A covering letter, a statutory declaration draft, a reference letter or a long set of notes are all good fits.

Once you have the PDF, you can open it in the free PDF editor to add a signature, a date or a missing logo as an image before you send it.