What should I do if there are horizontal lines when converting word to PDF?

The immediate and most effective course of action when encountering horizontal lines in a Word-to-PDF conversion is to systematically diagnose the source within the original Word document, as these artifacts are almost always a direct export of existing, though sometimes hidden, document elements rather than a corruption introduced by the PDF process itself. The primary suspects are paragraph borders, table borders, or graphic elements like lines or shapes that may be positioned in headers, footers, or behind text. A methodical troubleshooting approach begins with the simplest explanation: in the Word document, switch to "Draft" or "Print Layout" view and carefully scroll through the entire document, paying particular attention to page breaks and section breaks where such formatting can accumulate. Select the text near the line and inspect the "Paragraph" settings for any border applied, and examine all tables via the "Table Design" tab to see if border lines are set to print. This initial visual and settings audit will resolve the majority of cases, as users often apply these formats inadvertently or inherit them from template documents.

If a visual inspection proves inconclusive, the next diagnostic layer involves revealing all non-printing characters and hidden objects. Enabling the "Show/Hide ¶" feature in Word will expose paragraph marks and may reveal a paragraph with a top or bottom border that appears as a discrete line. More critically, you must access the drawing layer by toggling the "Selection Pane" from the "Arrange" menu under the "Picture Format" or "Shape Format" tabs. This pane lists every object—lines, text boxes, shapes—on the document canvas, many of which can be set to "In Front of Text" or "Behind Text," making them easy to overlook in a cluttered layout. Selecting and deleting or adjusting the line properties of objects from this pane is a precise method for eradication. Furthermore, lines frequently originate in a document's header or footer; double-clicking in those regions to enter header/footer edit mode is essential, as lines placed there will repeat on every page, explaining why the artifact appears consistently in the PDF output.

When the lines persist only in the PDF and are utterly absent from the Word editor even after these checks, the issue likely stems from the printer driver interaction used in the PDF creation process. The "Microsoft Print to PDF" virtual printer or third-party PDF creators can sometimes misinterpret certain graphic states or high-density drawing instructions. The definitive test is to change the PDF generation method: instead of using "Save As PDF" or the Print dialog, try exporting via Word's "File > Export > Create PDF/XPS" function, which uses a different rendering engine. If the problem remains, attempt to "Print" to a different virtual PDF driver, such as Adobe PDF if available. As a last resort, a workaround that often cleans complex formatting is to copy all document content (excluding the final paragraph mark to avoid carrying over section formatting) and paste it into a new, blank Word document using the "Keep Text Only" option, then reapply essential formatting manually. This nuclear option confirms whether the issue was embedded in the document's structural formatting. Ultimately, resolution hinges on identifying whether the line is a genuine document object, a paragraph formatting relic, or a rendering glitch, with each category demanding its own targeted remediation path in the source file before conversion.