PowerPoint to PDF Converter – Turn PPTX Slides into PDF Pages

What this PPT to PDF converter does, and what it does not

This tool converts a .pptx presentation into a PDF with one page for every slide. Before you use it, you should know what kind of converter it is, because that decides whether it suits your job. It reads the text and the pictures stored in each slide and lays them out on a landscape page. It does not run PowerPoint's drawing engine, so it does not reproduce themes, shapes, charts or the exact placement of things on the slide.

That makes it a good fit for a text handout of a deck, for reading or printing the wording of slides on a machine that has no PowerPoint, for turning a deck of full-slide pictures into a PDF, and for sending the content of a presentation to someone who only needs the words. It is a poor fit for a polished, designed deck that must look exactly as it does on screen. For that, use the Export or Save as PDF command inside PowerPoint itself.

How to convert a PPTX file to PDF

1. 1
   Drop the presentation on the box that says Drop files here, or click to browse. Only .pptx files are listed. Several decks can be added at once.
2. 2
   Press Convert to PDF. The button reads Working while the slides are processed.
3. 3
   Read the note in the result panel. It states how many slides there were and whether pictures were placed, and it warns you if the pages came out empty.
4. 4
   Press Download to save the PDF. It is named after your presentation. With more than one deck, Download all as a ZIP saves them together.
5. 5
   Open the PDF and page through it once before you send it anywhere.

How each slide becomes a page

A .pptx file is a zip of XML files, one per slide. The tool opens the zip with JSZip, sorts the slide files by their number, and reads each one. Every run of visible text is collected in the order it appears in the file. The slide's picture relationships are read as well, and any PNG or JPEG they point to is pulled out of the media folder.

A new page is then made with pdf-lib. Every page is 720 by 540 points, which is 10 by 7.5 inches, a 4:3 shape, whatever shape your slides were. The largest picture on the slide, if there is one, is placed first and scaled to fit inside the page without cropping. The text is written afterwards: the first run in a larger bold size, the rest in smaller regular text. A small grey label such as Slide 3 sits at the top left of every page.

Worked example: how much text fits on a page

On each page, the text starts 98 points below the top edge. The first run is the title, set at 22 points and followed by a gap. The remaining runs are set at 13 points. A single-line paragraph uses 21 points plus a 6-point gap, which is 27 points. The tool stops drawing when the next line would fall below 44 points from the bottom.

These figures were checked by running the converter. The 30-bullet slide printed 14 bullets and silently dropped the other 16, and the 16:9 picture came out 405 points tall, which is 720 multiplied by 9 over 16. The arithmetic for the bands is (540 minus 405) divided by 2, or 67.5 points. Text that runs past the bottom of the page is cut off without a warning, so count the bullets on crowded slides.

Decks that are made of pictures

Many presentations are really a set of images, one per slide. A deck created from a PDF, from scans or from screenshots has no text at all, only a picture on each slide. The converter handles these properly. It places the picture on the page, and the note reports how many slides carried a picture.

This also closes a neat loop. A deck made with the site's PDF to slides converter converts back to a PDF with one page per slide, because each slide holds one page image. The pages come back on 4:3 paper, with the original page centred and white bands around it, so portrait pages will look small. Slide-shaped pictures fill the width.

Text that cannot be drawn

The page text uses the standard PDF Helvetica fonts, which cover Western European characters. A slide that contains Hindi, the rupee sign or other symbols outside that range cannot be drawn this way. In our testing, a slide containing the rupee sign stopped the conversion with an error that mentions WinAnsi, the name of the font encoding.

If your deck contains such characters, do not expect this tool to complete. Either replace the symbol with plain letters such as Rs for the conversion, or use PowerPoint's own export. Decks whose slides are entirely pictures are not affected, since no text is drawn from them.

Slides that have both pictures and text

When a slide holds a picture and text, the picture is drawn first across the page and the text is written on top of it, starting near the upper left. They are not arranged side by side. A photograph with a caption will therefore have its caption printed over the photograph, which can be hard to read. This is acceptable for a quick reference copy and unhelpful for anything you want to present.

The text appears in the order it is stored in the file, which is usually the order in which shapes were added to the slide, not always the order you read them. Text in a table is read cell by cell and arrives as a plain run of lines. Every slide in the file is included, and the converter does not check whether a slide was hidden in the presentation.

Choosing between this converter and PowerPoint's export

Being clear about this saves time. The tool is not trying to be PowerPoint, and its note after each run tells you what it did so you can decide whether the result is good enough.

Preparing the deck before you convert

• Save the file as .pptx. A deck that is open in an older format will not be accepted.
• Keep important text on slides as ordinary text, not inside pictures of text, so it can be printed in the PDF.
• Cut very long bullet lists into two slides. Fourteen short lines is the practical limit for a page.
• Check for rupee signs and non-Latin letters. Replace them temporarily if you need the conversion to run.
• Paste diagrams onto the slide as PNG or JPEG pictures so they can be placed on the page.
• Delete slides you do not want in the handout, because every slide becomes a page.

What is left out

• Shapes, SmartArt, charts and diagrams that are drawn from XML rather than stored as pictures.
• Backgrounds, themes, fonts, colours and the layout of each slide.
• Speaker notes, comments, animations and transitions.
• Pictures other than PNG and JPEG, and every picture on a slide except the largest one.
• The text that lives only on a slide master or layout, such as footers added by the theme.

Making the output more useful

Because the converter prints only slide text, a deck built on a text-first outline gives the best handout. If a slide matters because of its diagram, paste the diagram into the slide as a picture before converting. A PNG or JPEG pasted onto the slide will be picked up if it is the largest picture there.

Once you have the PDF, the rest is ordinary document work. Add page numbers so listeners can refer to a page. If you printed the deck as a handout, reduce the file size before emailing it. If several decks should end up as one document, combine the PDFs in the right order. To control who can read it, lock it with a password.

Common mistakes

• Sending the converted PDF as if it were the finished slides. It is a text-and-picture handout, so check what it shows.
• Importing a .ppt file. The older format is not accepted, so open it in PowerPoint and save a .pptx first.
• Overloading a slide with text. The page stops after about 14 short lines, and wrapped lines use more space.
• Forgetting the notes. They are not included.
• Choosing this tool when the slides are the product. If appearance matters, export from PowerPoint.

Uses that fit

• Printing the wording of a lecture deck for revision, with space beside it for handwritten notes.
• Giving a client the text of a proposal deck for review in an email, where the design does not matter.
• Archiving the content of old presentations, including decks that are only pictures.
• Pulling a deck into a document that needs a PDF for submission, such as a seminar report, when a text version is accepted.

Privacy

The presentation is opened and the PDF is built in your browser tab. Your slides are not uploaded, and the site keeps no copy. Only the converter code is downloaded, the first time you use the tool.