UDF to Word Converter (UDF to DOCX)

Why convert to Word?

A PDF is ideal for reading and sharing but not for working on a text. When you want to quote a long passage while drafting a reply, move a table from an expert report into your own report, reuse an old petition as a template, or keep the text of a decision together with your notes, you need an editable document. Converting a UDF to Word keeps the text, the paragraph structure and the formatting, so you avoid the bold, italics and alignment that are lost when you copy and paste.

What is carried over

The converter reads every paragraph and character format in the UDF and translates it into its Word equivalent:

• Font name, size, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, colour and highlight.
• Alignment (left, centre, right, justified), indents, hanging indents, and paragraph and line spacing.
• Tab stops: the alignments on signature and date lines stay in the same place in Word.
• Numbered and bulleted lists.
• Tables, horizontally merged cells and borders.
• Images, header, footer and page-number field.
• Paper size, orientation and margins.

Limitations and things to watch

Word lays out text by its own rules, so lines and pages may end in slightly different places than in the UYAP Document Editor. This is not an error; the two programs set the text differently. Template fields in the UDF, such as a filled-in court name or case number, appear as plain text in Word. The e-signature is not carried into the Word file, so the result is a copy. If an element cannot be carried over, the tool lists it as a warning on the result screen.

If the font used in the document is not installed on your computer, Word shows it in another font. Times New Roman and Arial are on almost every computer, so this rarely happens with court documents.

Choosing DOCX, ODT, RTF or TXT

The default output on this page is Word, but you can choose among four editable formats:

• DOCX: opens in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Pages and LibreOffice. If you are not sure, choose this.
• ODT: the open document format for LibreOffice users, which some institutions prefer for archives.
• RTF: for very old word processors and some specialist software. The UYAP Document Editor can also open RTF files, so it is useful as an intermediate format.
• TXT: unformatted plain text, for pasting a paragraph into an e-mail or message or moving the text into other software. If Turkish letters look wrong in an old Notepad, switch on the UTF-8 BOM option in the settings.

Editing, then making a UDF again

A common workflow is to convert an old petition from UDF to Word, edit it for the new case, then convert it back to UDF and sign it in the UYAP Document Editor. For the second half of that loop use Word to UDF. The UDF you create is unsigned and must be checked and signed before it is submitted.

Why not just copy and paste?

Selecting text in the editor and pasting it into Word may be fine for a short paragraph. In longer documents it tends to break table structure, tab alignments, numbered lists and often line spacing, and the page setup is not carried over at all. Conversion transfers the structure of the document as a whole. If you work with many documents, select several UDF files and convert them all at once, then download the results as a ZIP; each Word file carries the name of its source UDF.

Why court documents should not be uploaded

Court decisions and petitions contain the names, national ID numbers and addresses of the parties, and sometimes health and family information. When you upload such a document to a conversion site, it stays outside your control for a while, even if the company says it deletes files after processing. Here, your UDF file is read in your browser and the Word document is produced there too; neither the content nor the file name reaches us.