Word to PDF

IBM invented the earliest word processors in the 1960s. Still, if most of us don’t remember the MT/ST (Len Deighton wrote Bomber, the first novel ever written with a word processor with IBM’s MT/ST), everyone today knows about Microsoft Word.
Imagined in 1981 and officially released in 1983, Word is far from outdated. Did you know that from the beginning, it run versions compatible on different platforms like Mac and even Atari?
Despite users’ complaints and a (relative) declining market share for the Microsoft Office productivity suite, Word is still widely used by professionals. Microsoft says there are now 1.2 billion users worldwide that use some Office product or service, which represents nearly 88 percent of the market share in 2017 . Even if there are many alternative solutions today (cloud-based, open-source, free), they all fall far behind.

The Microsoft proprietary DOC format was the default format used – and only supported – by Microsoft Word from 1997 to 2003. So why did Microsoft create a new format? First, it was a combined pressure from both government bodies (like the European Union and some US states) and the competition of the free and open-source world (with Open Office and its Open Document Formats) that pushed Microsoft to open up its formats in the early 2000s.
Once Microsoft opened the specifications for the DOC file format , it became easy for its competitors to reverse engineer it and copy its features in their applications.
The standard Microsoft chose to open its Office formats is Office Open XML. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents became .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx, the "X" being for XML. By 2007, the DOCX file format became part of Office 2007, and it is now the de facto standard for text documents.

A DOCX file comprises a collection of XML files that are contained inside a ZIP archive. The contents of the document consist of metadata files and the document itself.
This format creates smaller, lighter files that are easier to read and transfer than DOC. Image support is more reliable with a better display and higher fidelity. DOCX is much less sensitive to file corruption when shared with other people and less prone to viruses than DOC.
The open nature of the Office Open XML standard means that it can be read by any word processor, including online tools like Google Docs.
DOCX belongs to the list of recommended formats for digital text established by the Library of Congress .