Text or Markdown to PDF

How to convert text or Markdown to PDF

1. Type or paste your text in the Text or Markdown box, or click Open a .txt or .md file (or drop it here).
2. Choose the Format: Markdown (headings, bold, lists…) formats your headings, emphasis and lists; Plain text (lines kept as typed) prints every line exactly where you broke it.
3. Optionally type a Document title (optional): it is printed in large type at the top of the first page and saved in the PDF’s properties.
4. Pick the Page size (A4, US Letter, US Legal or A5), the Orientation and the Margins (mm).
5. Choose the Font, the Font size (pt) and the Line spacing, and tick Page numbers at the bottom if you want “Page 1 of 3” in the footer.
6. Check the Preview, then click Download PDF.

The PDF is built in your browser. Your text never leaves your device, so the tool is fine for private notes, drafts and letters.

Markdown you can use

This tool understands the everyday subset of Markdown:

• # Heading to ###### Heading for six levels of headings (a line underlined with === or --- also becomes a heading);
• **bold**, *italic* (or _italic_) and ***bold italic***;
• `inline code` and fenced code blocks between two lines of three backticks, printed in Courier on a light grey background with every space kept;
• bullet lists (-, * or +), numbered lists (1. or 1)), nested by indenting with two spaces, and task lists (- [ ] and - [x]);
• block quotes starting with >, and horizontal rules (---);
• links, printed as their text followed by the address in brackets, so the address stays readable on paper;
• simple pipe tables, printed as aligned monospace columns.

Raw HTML, footnotes and images are not interpreted: an image is replaced by its alt text. As in standard Markdown, the lines of a paragraph are joined into one flowing paragraph; leave an empty line to start a new one. If you want every line break kept, switch to plain text.

Fonts and special characters

The PDF uses the three standard PDF fonts, Helvetica, Times and Courier, which every PDF reader has built in. That keeps files tiny (a few kilobytes for a page of text) and the text searchable and selectable. These fonts cover the Windows-1252 character set: English, French with all its accents and ligatures (é, ç, œ, « »), Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, the Nordic languages, plus the euro sign, dashes and curly quotes.

Other characters are handled automatically. For Greek, Cyrillic and Central or Eastern European letters (ł, ő, ș, č…), the PDF embeds the Liberation Sans font, loaded only when your text needs it (text set in Times or Courier then uses this sans-serif font). Scripts that font doesn’t cover, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese or emoji, are drawn with your browser’s own fonts and placed in the PDF as images: they print correctly but can’t be selected or searched, and a notice lists them. A document that starts with Arabic or Hebrew text is laid out from right to left.

Layout details

Lines wrap at word boundaries and very long words (like URLs) are broken so they never overflow the margin. A heading is never left alone at the bottom of a page: it moves to the next page with the first line that follows it. Plain-text mode keeps leading spaces, so indented text stays indented. Typical settings for a letter or report are 11 pt, 1.15 spacing and 20–25 mm margins; for a draft to annotate, try double spacing.