CECO PDF

Word to PDF, with any difference in layout named

A Word document, as a PDF

Drop a .docx, .doc or .odt file on the convert page and get it back as a PDF: one document, or several, with photos and text files among them if you like, made into one PDF in the order you set. A document brings its own paper size and margins, and those are kept; the convert page's paper and margin choices are for photos and text, and when you change them, the record says they were not applied to the document.

Convert Word to PDF now — it opens the tool, with nothing to install.

Laid out by LibreOffice

The document is laid out by LibreOffice, the open-source office suite, on our own server; Microsoft Word plays no part. LibreOffice is not Word, and some documents come out differently. Microsoft's core fonts, Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, Georgia and Verdana among them, are on the server itself, and Calibri and Cambria are drawn in fonts made to the same widths, so lines and pages break where they did. Aptos, the newer default in Word, is not on the server: it is drawn in the font there nearest its widths, close but not the same, so a line or a page break can still move, and any other font the server does not have is replaced by one it has. Words in other writing systems, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi and Thai among them, are drawn in fonts that have their letters, and a character no font on the server has is refused, and named, rather than left as an empty box. A feature LibreOffice does not support is left out. The result says when it could tell that something like this happened, including when Word recorded a different number of pages in the file than the PDF has, and a converted document is never called identical to the one you sent.

The PDF shows what a printout would: comments are left out; a field that shows today's date or the time shows the moment the document is converted, and the record of a .docx or .odt notes it, while one locked in Word or fixed in LibreOffice keeps what it showed when the file was saved; and a form's fields are drawn as they look rather than made into fields to fill in. A photo in the document keeps its picture, but what the camera noted beside it, such as where it was taken and the camera's serial number, is left out of the PDF. LibreOffice runs apart from the rest of the service, with no connection to the internet, and macros in the document are never run.

Documents with a password

A document that asks for a password before it opens is refused before anything is done with it. The converter cannot take a password, and nothing here tries to get round one: take the password off in the program that set it, and convert that copy.

A heavier job than a photo

Laying out a document takes longer than placing a photo, and the convert page shows how it is going. A conversion that does not finish in the time it is given is stopped, and you are told so, rather than left waiting. Memory has its limit too: a .docx or .odt whose pictures together are more than one conversion can hold is refused before it is sent, with their size in the message, and any document that runs out of memory while it is laid out is refused with a message that says so.

How much at once

One conversion takes up to 50 files, 32 MB of them in all, and each file up to the size your plan uploads. For more files, convert them in batches and join the PDFs with Merge PDF. The PDF it makes holds no more pages than your plan allows in one document.

The record

The PDF says how it was made, in the record it carries and in your account's trail. For each file it names the kind, the fingerprint, and that LibreOffice laid it out, which version of it did, and whether the layout may differ, and why. The files you send are kept only until the conversion has answered; the PDF is kept with your documents like any other, and deleted after 90 days, or whenever you erase it. What a download costs is on the pricing page.

Other files into PDF

Every kind of file the converter takes, and what the PDF keeps of each, is on Convert to PDF.

And then