ABW to PDF
Nothing you choose here leaves your browser, and nothing is downloaded to make it work. The PDF is typeset on your own device by a page of code that is part of this site — there is no library, no server, and no upload.
The words come out as words. This typesets the document rather than photographing it, so the PDF holds real text that can be searched, selected and copied — and it does it without fetching a single byte, because a PDF is allowed to name Times without carrying it.
What this conversion costs you
Every conversion loses something, and the honest version of that sentence names it. Here is what turning an AbiWord document into a PDF keeps and what it does not.
What survives
- The words, all of them, as text. The PDF holds characters rather than a picture of them, so it can be searched, selected and copied — which is the thing most converters that go through an image quietly take away.
- The structure that carries meaning: headings, paragraphs, lists, block quotations, preformatted text, tables and rules. Bold and italic survive inside a sentence, not just around one.
What does not
- The typeface. You get Times, Helvetica or Courier, because those are among the fourteen fonts a PDF may name without carrying them — and carrying one would mean downloading it. Your document's own font is not in the file and is not used.
- The page layout of the original. This is a re-typesetting, not a photograph: line breaks, page breaks and column widths are decided here, from the paper size and margin you chose, so nothing lands where it landed in the original.
- Images. Nothing in this page draws one — a document's pictures are not carried across, and where one stood there is simply nothing.
- Anything the source could not express. What reaches the PDF is what this site's reader found in the file, and nothing is invented to fill a gap.
- Anything Windows-1252 cannot hold. A PDF using a base-14 font is limited to that character set, so Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Hebrew cannot be written this way. Rather than dropping them silently, each becomes a question mark and the page counts them and tells you.
How it works, and why nothing is downloaded
A PDF may name any of fourteen fonts — four Helvetica, four Times, four Courier, Symbol and ZapfDingbats — without embedding them, because every reader is required to already have them. That single fact is what makes this page possible: a typeset document comes out as a few kilobytes that fetch nothing.
To break lines, the page needs to know how wide every character is. Those numbers are Adobe's published metrics — 2,616 of them across the twelve text faces — and they are not typed in here. They are read from a published copy and checked, glyph by glyph, against a second implementation's independent copy. Checking one source against another found a real error: a widely used library maps both the capital and the small Y-with-diaeresis to the same glyph name, which would set the capital 167 thousandths of an em too narrow.
The rest is arithmetic you could redo: a word's width is the sum of its characters' widths, a line takes words until the next one would not fit, and a page takes lines until the next would fall below the margin. Line breaking here is greedy rather than optimal — it decides each line as it reaches it, instead of balancing the whole paragraph at once. For a converter that is the right trade, and it shows up as slightly looser spacing rather than as anything wrong.
The claim this page makes about itself is checked by measurement rather than assertion: every line's computed width is compared against the width that line actually came out, read back from the finished PDF by an outside implementation. A file that merely opens proves very little — PDF readers silently repair broken files — so what is verified is the rendering, not the structure.
Where to go next
The same job from other formats, and the other PDF pages:
- DOCX TO PDF
- DOCM TO PDF
- DOTX TO PDF
- ODT TO PDF
- OTT TO PDF
- SXW TO PDF
- STW TO PDF
- HWPX TO PDF
- RTF TO PDF
- MD TO PDF
- HTML TO PDF
- HTM TO PDF
- TXT TO PDF
- ZABW TO PDF
- PDF to text — the other direction.
- Every file converter — the rest of them.
What this does not do
It does not embed fonts, so it cannot reproduce your document's typeface and cannot write any script outside Windows-1252. If you need Greek, Cyrillic or CJK text in a PDF, this is the wrong tool and it will say so rather than produce a file full of question marks without mention.
It does not carry images across, does not number pages, does not build a table of contents, and does not justify text. It does not read a PDF — PDF to text does that — and it does not merge, split or sign one.
And it does not upload anything, so it cannot work on a file that is not on the device you are using.