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PDF365

Roadmap

The tools below are planned but not yet available. We’d rather tell you that clearly than put up buttons that don’t work, or produce conversions that quietly lose formatting.

Why these tools take longer

Everything currently on PDF365 runs in your browser. Office document conversion is different: faithfully laying out a Word document, spreadsheet or presentation needs a full office suite, which is far too large to download into a web page. These conversions therefore need a server.

Before we switch any server-side tool on, it will have to meet these commitments:

  • Explicit consent. You’ll be told the file will be uploaded, and asked to agree, before anything is sent.
  • Short retention. Files are processed in temporary, isolated storage and deleted automatically within a short, published time limit.
  • Isolation. Every conversion runs in a sandbox with no network access, strict time and memory limits, and no ability to run macros.
  • Encryption in transit. HTTPS only, with no logging of file names or contents.
  • Honest output. If a conversion loses formatting, the tool says so.

Planned tools

Word to PDF Planned

Accurate conversion of .docx files needs a full layout engine. We plan to use LibreOffice running on an isolated server, which handles most documents well. Complex layouts and uncommon fonts can still shift slightly, and we will say so on the tool.

PDF to Word Planned

This is the hardest conversion: a PDF stores positioned characters, not paragraphs, so rebuilding an editable document is reconstruction rather than conversion. We will only launch it when the results are good enough to be useful, and we will be clear that complex layouts need tidying afterwards.

Excel to PDF Planned

Spreadsheets raise questions a simple converter can’t answer, such as where pages should break and how wide columns can be. We plan to offer print-area and fit-to-width options built on the same LibreOffice engine.

PowerPoint to PDF Planned

Slides convert well in most cases. Animations, embedded video and some fonts can’t be represented in a PDF; the tool will list anything that was dropped.

OCR PDF Planned

Optical character recognition makes scanned documents searchable. The open-source Tesseract engine can run in the browser, which would keep this tool upload-free. The challenge is speed and memory on phones, which we are testing.

PDF to Excel Planned

Extracting tables works well for PDFs created from spreadsheets and much less well for scans or complex layouts. We plan to show a preview of each detected table so you can check it before downloading.

In the meantime

  • Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pages and Google Docs can all export PDFs directly, usually under File › Save As, Export or Download.
  • For plain text, use Text to PDF. For simple formatted documents, HTML to PDF uses your browser’s own engine.
  • To copy text from a scan, many phones can now recognise text in photos directly from the camera or photo viewer.

Is there a tool you’d like us to prioritise? Let us know.