About Markdown to PDF
Markdown is pleasant to write, but a reader who isn’t a developer would rather get a document than a file full of pound signs and asterisks. This tool parses your Markdown with marked, an MIT-licensed open-source library, following the CommonMark specification plus two GitHub additions: tables and strikethrough. The parsed document is then typeset onto Letter or A4 pages in a single, readable style.
Elements that come out formatted
- Headings, paragraphs, bold, italic and strikethrough
- Inline code, plus fenced code blocks set in a monospace font on a shaded background
- Bulleted, numbered and nested lists
- Blockquotes and horizontal rules
- Tables, drawn as a simple grid
- Links, which remain clickable in the PDF
The look is fixed: there are no themes and no way to apply your own CSS. The two things you control are the paper size and the base font size. That keeps the tool quick to use and the output consistent, which suits handouts, documentation and reports better than it suits designed brochures.
How to use Markdown to PDF
- Open your .md fileSelect a Markdown file or drag it onto the tool. Exports from note apps, wikis and code repositories all work, as long as they use standard Markdown syntax.
- Set paper and base font sizeChoose Letter or A4, then the base font size for body text. A smaller size fits more of a wide table or a long code line across the page.
- Render it and downloadCreate the PDF and save it. Open it once to check headings, tables and any image placeholders before you send it on.
When people use it
A README for someone outside the repository
Project setup notes written in Markdown can go to a client or manager as a PDF that opens anywhere, with installation steps as numbered lists and commands in shaded code blocks.
Meeting notes turned into a handout
Notes typed fast in Markdown, with a heading per topic, bullet points for decisions and a small table of owners and dates, become a printable page for the next meeting.
Coursework drafted in a plain-text editor
A course portal accepts PDF only, but you write in Markdown. Convert the final file and upload a document whose headings, quotations and source links keep their formatting.
Why pictures appear as placeholders
Markdown refers to images by a path or a web address, for example . This page doesn’t load files from outside the site, so referenced images aren’t fetched. In their place the PDF shows a placeholder reading [image: alt text], using the description between the square brackets, so a reader can tell a picture belonged there. Writing meaningful alt text in your Markdown therefore pays off.
When the pictures matter, make a PDF of them with JPG to PDF or PNG to PDF and combine it with the rendered text using Merge PDF.
Languages and the fonts behind them
English and other languages written in the Latin alphabet use Helvetica and Courier, standard fonts every PDF reader already has, so nothing needs embedding. Greek and Cyrillic are set in Roboto, and Chinese and Japanese in Droid Sans Fallback; both fonts are Apache-2.0 licensed and embedded as subsets containing only the characters your document uses. The CJK font is a download of about 4 MB that your browser fetches only when the Markdown actually contains such characters.
Korean Hangul isn’t covered by either font and comes out as question marks. Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left scripts, as well as complex scripts such as Hindi and Thai, are not laid out correctly. For documents in those languages, a word processor or browser that supports them is a better route to PDF.
Quality and size of the output
All text in the PDF is vector text: sharp at any zoom, searchable and copyable. Because no pictures are embedded and fonts are subset, a typical Markdown document produces a light file that is easy to email. Links keep working in viewers that support them. For a printed copy that needs page numbers, run the result through Add Page Numbers.
Syntax that won’t render
- Images, which become placeholders as described above.
- Styling of your own: custom CSS, themes, colors and font choices.
- Extensions outside CommonMark apart from GitHub tables and strikethrough. Footnotes, math formulas and diagrams written as code are not part of that set, so expect to see their source text rather than a rendered result.
- Plain text files. If your file isn’t really Markdown, TXT to PDF keeps every line and space exactly as typed.
Parsing and page layout both run in this browser tab; the Markdown and the resulting PDF stay on your device. Here is how to confirm it.