Markdown to PDF

How to use the markdown to pdf

1. Paste Markdown, or send it here from another tool.
2. Choose a page size, margin and text size.
3. Make the PDF and download it.

About this tool

This lays Markdown out as a PDF rather than printing it as plain text. Headings get their own sizes and weights, lists are indented and bulleted, quotes are set in italic, fenced code is set in a monospace font, and horizontal rules are drawn as actual lines.

Text is wrapped by measuring it in the font that will render it, not by counting characters. Proportional fonts vary by a factor of four between an `i` and a `W`, so a character count produces lines that overrun on some paragraphs and stop short on others — the difference is obvious on any page with a mix of capitals and lower case.

Inline bold and italic are flattened to plain text, and that is a real limitation rather than an oversight. pdf-lib draws one font per call, so a sentence with a bold word in the middle has to be split into separately positioned runs with their widths measured individually — a different piece of work from what it looks like, and one that goes wrong at line breaks. Block-level styling is honest; inline styling would be half-done.

The standard PDF fonts cover Latin text only. Characters outside that range are replaced with a question mark rather than failing the build, and the page says so — pdf-lib throws on them rather than substituting, so silently dropping the document would be the alternative.

Common uses

• Turning a README into something you can email or print.
• Making a PDF of meeting notes written in Markdown.
• Producing a printable version of documentation.

Frequently asked questions

Does it support bold and italic inside a paragraph?

No. Those markers are stripped and the text is set in one weight. pdf-lib draws one font per call, so mixed weights within a line need separately measured runs — half-doing it would break at line ends.

Are Markdown tables supported?

Not in this tool. Tables are laid out by the CSV to PDF tool, which sizes columns and repeats headers across pages.

What happens to accented or non-Latin characters?

The standard PDF fonts cover Latin only, so anything outside that becomes a question mark. Embedding a Unicode font would add hundreds of kilobytes and licensing questions to every file.