DOC to PDF Converter

Convert old Word .doc files to PDF in your browser

This DOC to PDF converter turns Microsoft Word 97–2003 documents — the .doc files Word saved by default until 2007 — into PDFs that open the same way on every phone, laptop and printer. It runs LibreOffice, the open-source office suite, inside your browser, so the old binary format is read properly: page size, margins, fonts, tables, headers and footers, footnotes, pictures and page breaks come through as they were laid out.

You still meet .doc files everywhere: application forms on government and university websites, contracts from older offices, CVs written years ago and archives exported from legacy systems. Browsers can’t open them, and many online converters upload them to a server. Here the file is read on your own device and nothing is sent anywhere — which matters for agreements, medical letters and anything with personal details.

The first conversion downloads the converter once (about 79 MB). Your browser keeps it, so later visits start in a couple of seconds, and a typical document converts in under a second.

How to use the DOC to PDF Converter

1. Drop one or more .doc files on the box above, or click it to choose them. A file that isn’t really a Word document is flagged before anything is downloaded.
2. Choose the PDF type — a standard PDF, or PDF/A for archiving — and tick Tagged PDF if the document has to work well with screen readers.
3. Press Convert to PDF. The first time, confirm the one-time 79 MB download of LibreOffice; the progress bar shows the download and then each file.
4. Check the preview: the page count, page size and first pages of the selected file are drawn below the list.
5. Download each PDF with its download button, or press Download all (ZIP) when you converted several.

DOC to PDF Converter features

What is a .doc file?

.doc is the binary “Word 97–2003 Document” format, documented by Microsoft as the Word Binary File Format (MS-DOC). Word used it as the default from Word 97 until Word 2007 switched to the XML-based .docx. Inside, a .doc is an OLE compound file — a small file system holding the text stream, the formatting tables and any embedded pictures — which is why browsers, phones and simple converters can’t read it.

If your file already ends in .docx, you can also use Word to PDF, which draws it without the large download. To bring a PDF back into an editable document, use PDF to Word.

How much of the layout survives?

Fonts and other scripts

Fonts cause most of the small differences between Word and any other program. The converter carries the Liberation fonts, which have the same character widths as Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New, plus Carlito for Calibri and Caladea for Cambria, so documents set in those fonts keep their line and page breaks. Other fonts are mapped to the closest available family (DejaVu, Noto or Liberation).

Hindi, Marathi and other Devanagari text works out of the box, and Noto fonts for Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil and Telugu are part of the download. For Chinese, Japanese or Korean, tick “Add fonts for Chinese, Japanese and Korean text” — an extra 18 MB, also kept for next time.

Requirements and limits

• A recent Chrome, Edge or Firefox on a computer or an Android phone. Safari, and every browser on iPhone and iPad, doesn’t yet support the cross-origin isolation LibreOffice needs; the page says so if that is your situation.
• About 1.5 GB of free memory while LibreOffice runs — close heavy tabs on older machines.
• Password-protected documents must be unlocked in Word first. Word for DOS files and badly damaged documents may not open at all.
• LibreOffice (MPL-2.0) is loaded unmodified from jsDelivr as the @bentopdf/libreoffice-wasm 2.3.1 build. Join PDFs afterwards with Merge PDF.