Create a PDF from anything, free and on your device

You do not need Acrobat, an account, or a converter site that asks for your file. The converter you are searching for is already installed: it ships inside Word, inside Google Docs, inside every browser, inside Windows 11, macOS, iPhone and Android. Converter sites thrive because these built-in routes hide 2 menus deep; this page shows where each one hides, which route keeps links and fonts intact, and which quietly loses them.

The only question that matters is where your document lives right now. Each starting point has 1 fastest route, and picking the right one is the difference between a PDF with working links and selectable text and a flat printout of the same pages.

The fastest free route, by source

Where the document is	The built-in route	What to watch
Word on your computer	File, Export, Create PDF/XPS	Keeps headings, links and fonts; tracked changes print as shown, so resolve them first
Google Docs	File, Download, PDF document	Links stay clickable; check page setup first or the breaks land oddly
A web page	Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac), destination Save as PDF	Margins, cookie banners and cut-off text; use reader mode first where the browser has one
Any app on Windows 11	Ctrl+P, pick Microsoft Print to PDF	A printout: links stop working and headings lose structure
Any app on a Mac	Cmd+P, then the PDF menu in the print dialog	Same flattening; prefer the app’s own export when it exists
An iPhone	Share, Options, PDF; or pinch out on the print preview	Check the page breaks before you send it
An Android phone	Print, then Save as PDF in the printer dropdown	The dropdown is the step everyone misses; check the paper size
An email or a thread	The print option in Gmail or Outlook, then Save as PDF	Attachments do not ride along; save them separately
Photos or paper	Not a print job: JPG to PDF, or scan first	A photo has no text layer until OCR adds one

Two patterns sit behind that table, and knowing them means you never need to look a route up again.

Print to PDF: the fallback that is always there

If an app can print, it can make a PDF. That single fact covers every program you will ever meet, including ones with no export of their own: a booking confirmation in some airline app, an old accounting program, a plain text file in Notepad.

On Windows 11, press Ctrl+P in any app and pick Microsoft Print to PDF as the printer. It is a virtual printer that writes a file instead of feeding paper, and it sits in every print dialog on the system. Restoring it when it has gone missing is its own small job, covered in the Windows print-to-PDF guide in this cluster.

On a Mac, press Cmd+P and look at the PDF menu in the bottom corner of the print dialog, then Save as PDF. It has been there since the earliest macOS releases and works in every app that prints.

On an iPhone, the route hides in the share sheet: tap Share, then Options at the top of the sheet, and pick PDF. There is a second, older trick: open the print preview and pinch out on the page thumbnail, and it silently becomes a PDF with its own Share button.

On Android, open the print dialog from any app that can print, then open the printer dropdown at the top and pick Save as PDF. The dropdown is the step most people miss; the saved file lands in Downloads.

In a browser, Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac) with the destination set to Save as PDF captures the page you are reading. For articles, switch the browser to reader mode first where it has one, so the ads and sidebars never make it into the file.

The universal fallback has 1 universal cost: printing flattens. The PDF that comes out looks right, but the heading structure that screen readers and bookmarks rely on is gone, and through Microsoft Print to PDF the hyperlinks stop being clickable too. (A browser’s own Save as PDF usually keeps links working; the structure still goes.) That is fine for a boarding pass. It is the wrong route for a report full of links, which brings us to the second pattern.

Export beats print, every time the app offers one

When the app your document is open in has its own PDF export, use it. An export writes a real document, not a picture of one.

In Word, the route is File, Export, Create PDF/XPS. It keeps headings, links and fonts: the table of contents stays clickable, the URLs in the footnotes work, and the fonts travel inside the file so the PDF looks the same on a recruiter’s laptop as on yours. The converter has been inside Word for years; nobody with Word installed needs a converter site. The export dialog has options worth 2 minutes of your attention (image quality, bookmarks from headings), and the Word entry in this cluster walks through each one.

In Google Docs, it is File, Download, PDF document (.pdf). Links stay clickable and the text stays selectable, both of which the print route would destroy. Check File, Page setup before you download: the paper size and margins set there are what the PDF gets, and a doc in pageless mode is cut into pages only on the way out, so look at where the breaks land.

The same logic extends to sources you might not think of as exportable. An email thread in Gmail or Outlook reaches PDF through its print option, with the trap that attachments never ride along; the paperclip prints, the invoice does not. A Markdown file or a plain .txt has its own quirks (line wrapping, encoding, page breaks), and each has a dedicated guide in this cluster. In every case the answer is already on your machine.

Photos and paper are a different job

A photographed contract is not a document yet; it is a picture of one. The print dialog has nothing to offer here, and this is the 1 starting point where a tool genuinely earns its place.

JPG to PDFImages to pages, size and margins. Free, runs on your device.Open

Drop the photos in, set the order, pick the page size, and 1 PDF comes out with each image placed on its own page. It takes JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP and more in one batch, and it leaves the camera’s GPS position, device and time out of each JPG. Everything runs in your browser: the photos never leave your device, and you can prove it by converting once, turning Wi-Fi off, and running the job again.

Two neighbouring jobs look similar and are not. Arranging images well (order, margins, page sizes) is covered in pictures to PDF; several photos on 1 sheet is a second step with N-up. And a photo-of-paper PDF still has no text layer, so nothing in it can be searched or copied until OCR reads it; making a scanned PDF searchable is that job.

After the PDF exists: the steps that make it sendable

Creating the PDF is rarely the whole job. The application portal wants 1 file, the email bounces, the pages need numbering. This is where the built-in routes stop and local tools take over; every step below runs on your device, and nothing is uploaded.

Merge the parts into 1 file. Jane Cooper applying for an apartment in Graz has a lease form from the landlord, a salary confirmation exported from Word and an ID photographed into a PDF. Three files become one:

Merge PDFCombine files, reorder, keep bookmarks. Free, runs on your device.Open

Set the order, merge, and the portal gets a single document. Reordering, rotating and deleting pages inside it afterwards is the territory of organising PDF pages.

Number the pages. A merged file made from 3 sources has 3 competing page counts or none at all. Add page numbers stamps a clean sequence so “see page 12” means something.

Shrink it under the cap. Portals cap uploads: the US National Visa Center takes 4 MB per file, Canada’s IRCC 4 or 5 MB, and LinkedIn recommends under 2 MB for a CV (checked on 11 October 2026). A PDF built from photos lands over the line easily. Compress it with a size target and it keeps the best quality that fits; the full story of why PDFs get big and what compression trades away is in make a PDF smaller.

Protect it when it carries personal data. A file with a salary figure and an ID in it deserves a password before it travels. Protect PDF encrypts it on your device; the file is unreadable without the password because it is encrypted, not because a site promises to be careful. And when the document needs a signature or has form fields to complete, signing and filling PDFs is the next stop.

Why go to this trouble for a PDF at all? Because it is the 1 format where the result is fixed: the fonts travel inside the file, the layout locks per page, and the same file opens the same way on a phone, a Mac and a 10-year-old office PC. One PDF instead of 5 attachments is also simply easier to receive, which is why portals and recruiters keep asking for it.

What the built-in routes get wrong

The honest part. The free routes above are the right answer for almost everyone, and they have real limits worth knowing before you hit them.

Web pages print badly by default. Margins fall where the browser decides, cookie banners and sticky headers print right over the text, and lazy-loaded images show up blank unless you scrolled past them first. Reader mode fixes most of it; the save-a-web-page guide in this cluster covers the stubborn cases.

Fillable Word forms go flat. Word’s content controls are Word features. File, Export writes their current text as static content; it does not create PDF form fields, and no setting in the dialog changes that. Recipients get a PDF that looks like a form and takes no input. The workarounds (fill before exporting, or let recipients type onto the flat file) have their own troubleshooter in this cluster.

Not every exporter embeds fonts. Word does by default; some other programs write a PDF that merely names the font and hopes the next machine has it. When it does not, the layout shifts. If a document must survive other people’s computers, open the PDF on a second device once before the deadline, not after.

Printing loses the living parts. Bookmarks and heading structure never survive a print, and Microsoft Print to PDF drops the hyperlinks too. Export when you can, print when you must.

And one limit of ours. getPDF has no Word to PDF converter today. It is coming, and when it lands this page will say so. Until then, the most faithful Word converter in existence is the copy of Word your document is already open in, and this page has shown you exactly where it hides. That is also the honest reason to skip the “free online docx converter” results above and below this one: they work by uploading your contract to someone else’s server, to do a job your own software does better without the file ever leaving the room.