Word to PDF Changed Your Fonts or Layout? Here's Why
By the FreePDF team ·
Your CV fitted on one page in Word, and the PDF has two lines spilling onto a second. Or a heading now sits alone at the bottom of a page, or the text just looks slightly different from what you typed. Almost always the cause is a font the converter didn't have, and sometimes it's a layout feature that Word handles its own way.
What happens to your file
Our Word to PDF doesn't run Microsoft Word. It opens your document in LibreOffice on our server and exports it from there. LibreOffice can only draw text in fonts that are installed on that machine or embedded in the document itself. When a font is missing, it picks a substitute. If the substitute's letters are a little wider or narrower, each line wraps at a different word, and a few extra lines per page are enough to push a table or a heading onto the next page.
Which fonts come through cleanly
The server has metric-compatible stand-ins for the classic Office fonts. These are drawn differently up close but have the same letter widths as the originals, so line breaks and page breaks survive:
- Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New
- Calibri and Cambria, the long-time Word defaults
There's also broad coverage for non-Latin scripts, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai and the Indic scripts, plus emoji.
What isn't there: Aptos (the newer Microsoft 365 default), Segoe UI, Georgia, Verdana, Century Gothic, and any brand font or font you downloaded yourself. Documents set in those get a substitute with different widths, and that's when layouts drift.
How to get a faithful PDF
- Embed the fonts in the .docx. In Word for Windows go to File, Options, Save and tick "Embed fonts in the file"; on a Mac it's under Word, Preferences, Save. LibreOffice will use fonts embedded this way. Some font licences forbid embedding, and Word skips those without warning, so check the result.
- Switch to a font the server has. Changing Aptos to Calibri, or Segoe UI to Arial, usually fixes pagination on its own. Changing the theme fonts under Design, Fonts updates headings and body text in one go.
- Export from Word when every line matters. For a one-page CV or a contract where clauses are cited by page, File, Save As, PDF in Word itself uses the exact fonts on your computer. You don't need a converter for that.
If you write in LibreOffice or OpenOffice already, save as .odt and use the OpenOffice converter. The same engine opens and exports the file, so there's no translation from Word's layout rules at all. Fonts still need to be common or embedded.
When it isn't the font
LibreOffice reads .docx well, but it isn't Word, and a few features land slightly differently. Pictures and text boxes that float with text wrapping can shift or overlap, because they're anchored to a paragraph that may have moved. Tables with auto-fitted columns can come out with different widths. Setting pictures to "In line with text" and giving table columns fixed widths removes most of that guesswork.
Check the result before you send it
If you have a reference PDF, say one a colleague exported from Word, run it and our conversion through Compare PDF. It compares the text line by line, which makes it a decent reflow detector: when every line matches, the wrapping matched too. A paragraph that shows up in red and again in green with the same words means the lines broke at different points, not that anything was lost. It won't flag a font swap or a moved picture, so still flip through the pages yourself.
Common questions
Why does my PDF have one more page than the Word document?
Usually a substituted font that runs a little wider, which adds a line here and there until the last paragraph tips over. Look for the font first. Empty paragraphs at the end of the document can also do it, so turn on formatting marks in Word and delete any stray ones.
Do Excel and PowerPoint files have the same problem?
Yes, they go through the same engine. In a spreadsheet, a wider substitute font can make numbers show as ### in narrow cells or push a column onto a separate page. In slides, text can overflow its box. The fixes are the same: common or embedded fonts, or export from the original app.