docxide-pdf

Library and CLI for converting DOCX files to PDF, matching Microsoft Word's output as closely as possible.

Try the demo!

🫶 Accessible: Output PDFs should be just as accessible as Word's export, or better: tagged structure, reading order, language and metadata that pass the same PDF/UA checks.

🎯 Accurate: Given a .docx file, produce a .pdf that is visually identical to what Word would export.

⚡️ Fast: Typical conversions complete in under 100ms.

🤏 Small files: Output PDFs should be the same size or smaller than Word's export.

Reference PDFs are generated using Microsoft Word for Mac (16.106.1 and later). Most (173 of 234) use the "Best for electronic distribution and accessibility (uses Microsoft online service)" export option; the other 61 were made with "Best for printing", macOS's untagged print path.

⚠️ Work in progress.

This crate might work for your production case, do give it a try! The API, output quality, and supported features are all actively changing.

Comparison with other converters

Side-by-side comparison

Score table

Every fixture in the test corpus rendered side by side by Word (the reference) and

• docxide-pdf (duh)
• LibreOffice
• MiniPdf's Rust crate
• rdocx
• office2pdf
• jubarte-redlines.

Each engine is scored against the Word reference with the same metrics the test suite uses: three for how the pages look, and one for how accessible the PDF is.

Got a weird DOCX?

If you have a .docx file that produces ugly, broken, or just plain wrong output, send it to me! Real-world documents with surprising formatting are the best way to improve. Open an issue or PR with the file included and I will try to make it work.

AI usage disclaimer 🤖

While the idea, architecture, testing strategy and validation of output are all human, the vast majority of the code as of now is written by various Claude models with access to the PDF specification (ISO-32000) and the Office Open XML File Formats specification (ECMA-376). This project was done as an exercise to get experience with the usage of coding agents.

Supported features

• Text: font embedding (TTF/OTF/TTC), bold, italic (sheared when the face has no italic), single and double underline, strikethrough, double strikethrough, font size, text color, superscript/subscript, small caps, all caps, character spacing, text expansion/compression (w:w), hidden text (w:vanish), kerning (legacy kern table + GPOS PairAdjustment), run borders with color/width/spacing, run shading (w:shd) and highlighting, legacy text-effect toggles (w:outline, w:shadow, w:emboss, w:imprint), Word 2010 text effects (w14:glow, w14:shadow, w14:textOutline, gradient w14:textFill), symbols (w:sym), positional tabs (w:ptab), non-breaking hyphens, UAX #14 line breaking
• Paragraphs: left/center/right/justify/distributed alignment (distribute), space before/after, line spacing (auto, exact, at-least), first-line and hanging indentation, left/right indentation, contextual spacing, keep-next, keep-lines, paragraph borders (top/bottom/left/right/between) with color, paragraph shading, text frames (w:framePr)
• Styles: paragraph and run style inheritance (basedOn chains), document defaults from docDefaults (all run properties: bold, italic, caps, smallCaps, vanish, strikethrough, dstrike, underline, color, char_spacing), theme fonts and colors
• Lists: bullet and numbered lists with multi-level nesting, custom number formats (incl. CJK: decimalEnclosedCircle, decimalFullWidth, aiueoFullWidth), list style inheritance, w:lvlRestart, w:lvlOverride/w:startOverride, w:isLgl, w:suff, w:pStyle level association
• Tables: column widths with auto-fit, merged cells (horizontal gridSpan and vertical vMerge), row heights (exact and minimum), per-cell borders with color/width, inline w:tblBorders, cell shading, pattern/hatch shading, vertical alignment, cell text direction (rotated cells, vertical CJK), cell margins, floating/positioned tables (tblpPr), nested tables, conditional formatting (tblLook/tblStylePr — banded rows/columns, first/last row and column), repeated header rows (tblHeader), cantSplit, Word-compatible row splitting across pages
• CJK text: CIDFont/Identity-H/ToUnicode encoding, Word-compatible substitution of missing CJK fonts by fontTable charset and family (Batang/Malgun Gothic/MS Mincho/SimSun/…, then Apple and Noto faces), per-character font fallback at render time, script-based run splitting via w:rFonts @eastAsia, Word's East Asian line height, compressPunctuation, autoSpaceDE/autoSpaceDN
• Images: inline JPEG/PNG/BMP/GIF/TIFF embedding with sizing and alpha transparency, grayscale and CMYK JPEG support, cropping (a:srcRect), EMF/WMF vector translation to PDF form XObjects, anchored/floating images with wrap modes (square, tight, through, topAndBottom), floating image positioning relative to page/margin/column, rotation, clipping to shape geometry, behind-document z-ordering, OLE objects (w:object) drawn from their preview picture
• Picture effects: outer shadow (a:outerShdw), inner shadow, glow, soft edges, reflection — rasterized blur masks via SMask
• Text boxes: DrawingML textboxes (wps:txbx) and VML fallback (v:textbox), shape fills (solid color with theme color support including lumMod/lumOff, linear gradients with multiple color stops), textbox body margins
• WordArt: modern DrawingML WordArt with all 40 prstTxWarp presets — two-path envelope warping (wave, slant, inflate, etc.) and single-path text-on-a-path (arch, circle), text outlines, shadows, glow effects, bold/italic font variant selection, VML WordArt fallback
• Shapes & geometry: all 187 OOXML preset shapes via formula-based geometry engine (guide formulas, adjustment values), custom geometry paths (a:custGeom with moveTo, lineTo, cubicBezTo, arcTo), shape fills and strokes, drawing canvases (wpc:wpc) and shape groups (wpg:wgp/grpSp) flattened with nested transforms, connectors
• Charts: bar (clustered/stacked/percent-stacked, vertical/horizontal), line, pie, area, doughnut, radar, scatter, bubble — with axis labels, tick marks, gridlines, legends, series markers, bubble fill opacity
• Math: Office Math (OMML) equations, inline and display (m:oMathPara) with justification
• Page layout: page size, margins, gutter margins, document grid (linePitch), page borders (w:pgBorders), vertical page alignment (w:vAlign), line numbering (w:lnNumType), explicit page breaks, pageBreakBefore, automatic page breaking with widow/orphan control
• Sections: multiple sections with nextPage/continuous/oddPage/evenPage breaks, per-section page size and margins, blank page insertion for odd/even page alignment
• Multi-column layout: 2+ columns with custom widths and spacing, column breaks, column separators
• Headers/footers: default, first-page, and even/odd variants, per-section headers/footers, STYLEREF field resolution (spec-compliant backward search), page number and page count fields, images in headers/footers, correct z-ordering (behind body content)
• Footnotes & endnotes: footnote references and page-bottom rendering with separator line, endnotes flowed at document end, per-section mark numbering formats, shading on reference marks
• Comments: word/comments.xml rendered in Word's right-hand review pane with callouts and body scaling
• Fields: PAGE, NUMPAGES, PAGEREF, STYLEREF (with spec-compliant search order) in complex w:fldChar fields, cached results for every other field (and for w:fldSimple)
• Hyperlinks: clickable external links (URI link annotations) and internal links (bookmarks, footnote marks)
• Tab stops: left, center, right, decimal; dot, hyphen and underscore leaders
• Track changes: final mode (insertions included, deletions removed — matches Word's PDF export)
• SmartArt: rendering via pre-flattened drawing shapes (dsp:drawing) with full geometry engine support — all 187 preset shapes, custom geometry, fills (solid, gradient, image), strokes, and text
• Document settings: word/settings.xml parsing — even/odd headers, default tab stop interval, gutterAtTop, themeFontLang, characterSpacingControl, compatibilityMode, linkStyles, doNotExpandShiftReturn
• Compatibility: mc:AlternateContent fallback, structured document tag (w:sdt) content extraction, w:customXml transparent wrappers, altChunk HTML content parsing, smart tag handling, VML fallbacks for shapes, textboxes, WordArt and w:object embeds
• Fonts: cross-platform font search (macOS/Linux/Windows), embedded DOCX font extraction and deobfuscation, font subsetting (CIDFont/Type0), disk-cached font index, Word's missing-font substitution (fontTable.xml altName, then Cambria or Calibri by family class)
• Accessibility: tagged PDF structure tree (headings, lists, tables, figures with alt text, links, notes, TOC), document and per-run language, XMP metadata, bookmarks from headings, PDF/UA-1 claimed when the document allows it
• Output optimization: font subsetting, content stream compression, compressed object streams

Not yet supported

• Text: text shaping/ligatures (fi, fl), complex script shaping (Arabic, Devanagari, etc.), automatic hyphenation (parked — Word's online converter doesn't hyphenate either), underline styles other than single/double, underline color, raised/lowered text (w:position), emphasis marks, w:fitText, ruby, drop caps, vertical text outside table cells
• Images: wrapping around floats anchored more than one paragraph below the text, more than one wrapping float at a time, tight vs through wrapping distinction
• Layout: mirror margins (w:mirrorMargins, not parsed), right-to-left (bidi) text, kashida justification (mediumKashida/highKashida/lowKashida render as plain justify — glyph elongation needs Arabic shaping), w:textAlignment, page background color
• Tab stops: bar tabs, middle-dot and heavy leaders
• Track changes: moved text (w:moveTo) is dropped
• Charts: 3D charts (3D pie is drawn flat), stock charts, combo charts (first chart type only), data labels, chart titles, secondary axes
• Shape effects: shadow/glow/soft edges on shapes and text boxes (pictures only), dashed outlines (a:prstDash), 3D bevel/rotation (a:scene3d, a:sp3d), preset shadows (a:prstShdw), radial/path gradient fills (drawn as linear)
• SmartArt: no layout engine for documents missing the dsp:drawing fallback (see roadmap)
• Features: table of contents generation (cached TOC results are drawn), embedded OLE object data (only the preview picture is drawn)
• Fonts: bundled fallback fonts (without the document's fonts installed, Arial/Liberation Sans/DejaVu Sans or Helvetica stand in)

Examples

Every test case rendered as a Word reference and with docxide-pdf on the comparison page.

Installation

# Install the CLI
cargo install docxide-pdf

Usage

CLI

# Convert a DOCX file to PDF
docxide-pdf input.docx

# Specify output path (defaults to input.pdf)
docxide-pdf input.docx output.pdf

The CLI never overwrites: if the output exists it writes output(2).pdf, output(3).pdf and so on. RUST_LOG=info prints timings.

Library

cargo add docxide-pdf --no-default-features

This avoids pulling in the CLI dependency (clap).

use docxide_pdf::convert_docx_to_pdf;
use std::path::Path;

convert_docx_to_pdf(
    Path::new("input.docx"),
    Path::new("output.pdf"),
)?;

Works well with docxide-template

docxide-template is a sibling crate for type-safe MS Word templates. It scans a folder of .docx files at compile time and generates a Rust struct per template, with {Placeholder} patterns turned into snake_case fields. Pair it with docxide-pdf to go from template → filled DOCX → PDF in a single, fully in-memory pipeline:

use docxide_pdf::convert_docx_bytes_to_pdf;
use docxide_template::generate_templates;
use std::path::Path;

generate_templates!("templates");

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let doc = HelloWorld {
        first_name: "Alice".into(),
        company: "Acme Corp".into(),
    };

    let docx_bytes = doc.to_bytes()?;
    convert_docx_bytes_to_pdf(&docx_bytes, Path::new("output/greeting.pdf"))?;
    Ok(())
}

100% Rust, end to end — no temporary files, and no Word or LibreOffice install required on the host. Fill the template in memory, hand the bytes to convert_docx_bytes_to_pdf, and write the PDF. Combined with docxide-template's embed feature, you get a single self-contained binary that turns structured data into a polished PDF.

Configuration

Environment Variables

Font scanning results are cached to disk (per-directory, invalidated by mtime). The cache is stored at:

• macOS: ~/Library/Caches/docxide-pdf/font-index.tsv
• Linux: $XDG_CACHE_HOME/docxide-pdf/font-index.tsv (default ~/.cache/)
• Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\docxide-pdf\cache\font-index.tsv

Testing

Tests require mutool on PATH for PDF-to-PNG rendering:

brew install mupdf        # macOS
apt install mupdf-tools   # Debian/Ubuntu

# Run all tests with a compact report of what changed
./tools/run-tests.sh

# Run only the visual comparison (Jaccard and SSIM)
./tools/run-tests.sh --test visual_comparison

.cargo/config.toml points DOCXSIDE_FONTS at a fonts/ directory that isn't in the repository (the fixtures' fonts can't be redistributed). Without those fonts many fixtures fall back to substitutes and score lower. The accessibility test also needs veraPDF and Poppler (brew install verapdf poppler) and skips without them.

SCORING.md explains every score: the visual metrics, the accessibility metrics and what fails the suite.

Debugging Tools

Build the tools once:

cd tools && cargo build

Then run from the project root:

# Inspect XML inside a DOCX
./tools/target/debug/docx-inspect input.docx

# Print font information
./tools/target/debug/docx-fonts input.docx

# Compare two rendered pages
./tools/target/debug/jaccard a.png b.png

# Full fixture diff
./tools/target/debug/case-diff case1

# Browse reference vs generated pages per fixture, with notes
./tools/target/debug/case-browser

# Fixture features and scores, e.g. only the failing ones
./tools/target/debug/analyze-fixtures --failing

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome!

License

Apache-2.0