Your files stay on your Mac.
Convertessa opens the Word 97–2003 binary format with LibreOffice and prints each document to PDF on your own Mac. Styles, tables, headers, footers, footnotes and embedded pictures are laid out as they render, then written as selectable text with the fonts embedded alongside. Quality governs how photographs inside the document are stored. Drop a folder of legacy files and the whole archive converts in one pass.
Open a .doc in a hex editor and you do not find a document, you find an OLE compound file: a miniature filesystem holding separate streams for text, formatting tables and embedded objects, written by Word between 1997 and 2003. Nothing on a current Mac opens it by double-click any more, which is why these files usually surface in bulk — an old archive, a legal disclosure, a shared drive nobody has touched in fifteen years.
Convertessa routes .doc through LibreOffice, which lays the document out and prints it to PDF. That layout is LibreOffice reading Word's rules, not Word itself. It usually lands within a line or two, because LibreOffice swaps in metric-compatible faces — Liberation Serif for Times New Roman, Liberation Sans for Arial — that take up the same width per character. Trouble starts with a document built on a font that is neither installed on your Mac nor has a metric twin: lines rewrap, and a page break moves.
PDF has no scripting and no fields that recalculate. Anything Word used to work out when the file opened — a DATE field, an auto page count, mail-merge placeholders — is written with the value it held at the moment of conversion and stays that way permanently. VBA macros are dropped, because PDF cannot hold them. An embedded Excel chart becomes a flat picture of a chart.
What comes through cleanly is more than people expect. Text stays text, so the PDF is selectable and searchable; Convertessa does not run OCR here and has no reason to. Fonts are subset and embedded, so the file reads correctly on a machine that never had them. Hyperlinks survive as clickable annotations.
Two practical notes. A password-protected .doc will fail rather than convert, since the engine cannot open it. And quality only touches photographs pasted into the document — a text-and-tables memo comes out about the same size wherever you set it.
Drag a folder of Word 97–2003 documents onto Convertessa. Every .doc it finds joins the queue, including the ones buried three folders deep, so a fifteen-year-old shared drive converts in a single drag.
Choose PDF as the target. Quality applies to photographs and scans pasted inside the document; body text, tables and drawings are written as vectors and look identical wherever the control sits.
Convertessa runs LibreOffice per file and writes the PDFs where you asked. Open the first result next to the original: if a font was substituted, the first paragraph shows it immediately.
Images, audio, video, documents, archives, eBooks and fonts — all converted natively, right on your Mac.
Pick a format you have — see everything Convertessa can turn it into.
Convert hundreds of files at once with per-type group defaults and individual overrides.
First-class support for HEIC, AVIF and WebP — encode and decode, both ways. Read JPEG XL and a dozen more modern formats too.
Drop files anywhere on the window. Native, instant, and exactly what you’d expect on a Mac.
Dial in compression, resolution and bitrate. Keep originals pristine or shrink for sharing.
Never overwrite a file by accident. Convertessa appends safe suffixes automatically.
Every job is logged locally. Re-run a previous conversion or revisit recent outputs in a click.
Bundle your converted files straight into a single ZIP, TAR or 7z — packaged and ready to share the moment a job finishes.
Right-click any file in Finder and choose Convert. A Quick Action handles it on the spot — no need to open the app first.
Shrink Convertessa to a tidy mini window that tucks into a corner — just a drop zone and a format picker for quick, one-off conversions.
No cloud. No account. No upload. Every conversion happens entirely on-device, using the power already in your Mac. What you convert is nobody’s business but yours.
Script conversions, wire them into your build, or batch a folder from the terminal. The same engine, no GUI required.
Read the full CLI documentation →Shrink Convertessa down to a small, focused window — drop, convert, done, with your recent conversions one click away.
macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon & Intel
New formats, new features, and fixes — every release, on the record.
Usually, but it is a rendering, not a copy. LibreOffice substitutes metric-compatible fonts for the common Microsoft ones — Liberation Serif stands in for Times New Roman, Liberation Sans for Arial — and because those have identical character widths, lines and page breaks land where you expect. A document set in a font your Mac does not have, and which has no metric equivalent, is the case where text rewraps and a heading slides onto the next page. If pagination is contractual, install the original fonts before converting.
Revision marks are carried into the rendering and printed as markup — Convertessa does not silently accept or reject anything on your behalf. If you want a clean deliverable, resolve the changes in a word processor first, then convert. Treat this as a feature when you are producing a redline for the other side, and as a trap when you are producing the final version.
No, and this catches people out. PDF has no live fields. A { DATE } field that showed today's date every time the document opened is frozen to the day you ran the conversion, and stays there for the life of the file. The same goes for auto-numbering, cross-references and mail-merge placeholders: whatever they displayed at conversion time is what the PDF says forever.
No. Word 97–2003 encryption sits between the engine and the content, so the file fails in the queue rather than producing an unreadable PDF. Remove the password in a word processor first, save, then convert. Files that are merely marked read-only or protected against editing are a different thing — those convert normally, because the content itself is not encrypted.
It depends entirely on what is inside. A text-heavy document often grows a little, because the PDF embeds font subsets the .doc merely referenced. A document carrying camera-resolution photographs usually shrinks, and that is where quality earns its keep:
convertessa report.doc --to pdf --quality 80
Presets work too — --quality balanced is the same setting by name.
Yes. LibreOffice reads the file's actual structure rather than trusting the extension, so a mislabelled DOCX, an RTF wearing a .doc name, or a genuine Word 6 file all convert. This is common in archives that were bulk-renamed at some point. The only real failure mode is a file that was truncated or corrupted in transfer, which fails loudly instead of producing half a PDF.
Macros do not — PDF has no place to put VBA, so it is dropped. Legacy Word form fields and content controls are printed in the state they were in: a checkbox shows ticked or unticked, a drop-down shows its current selection, and none of it stays interactive. If you need a fillable PDF, build the form in a PDF editor after conversion.