Markdown to PDF Converter

Markdown is a plain-text way of writing formatted text: a hash starts a heading, asterisks make text bold or italic, a dash starts a list, and three backticks open a code block. It is how README files, notes, documentation and a great many drafts are written. A PDF, by contrast, fixes that formatting onto pages of a chosen size — the format you send to someone when the layout has to be the layout, in a reader they already have.

This tool turns the two into each other in one step. Paste Markdown, and it produces a genuine, paginated PDF: headings are set larger and bold, paragraphs are wrapped to the page width, bullet and numbered lists get real markers, code blocks are set in a monospaced font on a tinted panel, blockquotes get a bar down the side, and horizontal rules become a dividing line. If the Markdown has a first-level heading, the file is named after it, so "# Quarterly Report" downloads as quarterly-report.pdf.

The layout is yours to set. Page size is A4, US Letter or US Legal. Font size is 8 to 24 points (the base size — headings scale up from it). Margins are 18 to 144 points on every side, where 72 points is one inch. Longer documents flow onto as many pages as they need, and each page is created for real rather than cut from one long scroll.

What this tool renders is a deliberate, documented subset of Markdown, and it says so rather than pretending otherwise. Headings, paragraphs, bold, italic, inline code, fenced code blocks, bullet and numbered lists, nested lists, blockquotes, horizontal rules, links and line breaks are all supported. Four things are not, and they are not silently dropped — a table, an image or a raw HTML block leaves a visible, clearly-marked placeholder in the PDF (and the result counts them), so you can see exactly what was left out. Footnotes from extended Markdown fall back to their literal text. If you need tables or images in your PDF, add them in a PDF editor after conversion, or use a full typesetting tool.

One honest limit matters most: the PDF's built-in fonts (Helvetica and Courier) cover Latin text and common Western punctuation only, not emoji, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek or other scripts. Rather than drawing blank boxes or letting the library crash, the tool checks every character before it writes a page and, if one cannot be drawn, refuses the conversion with a message that names the exact character and explains the fix. Nothing is uploaded at any point — the Markdown is parsed and the PDF is built entirely inside your browser tab.

The tool parses the Markdown into tokens, walks those tokens into a small set of layout blocks, then lays the blocks out into a paginated PDF:

• Headings (# to ######) — set bold, each level larger than the last (1.8× the base size for an h1, down to 0.9× for an h6). • Paragraphs — wrapped to the text column with the font's own metrics, so long words that cannot fit are split rather than running off the page. • Bold, italic, bold-italic, strikethrough, inline code and links — each drawn in the matching font; a link is coloured, underlined and, when its target is http(s) or mailto, given a real clickable link annotation. • Bullet and numbered lists, including nesting — each item gets a "•" or the correct running number, indented under its parent. • Fenced code blocks — set verbatim in Courier on a tinted panel, with tabs expanded to four spaces. • Blockquotes — indented with a vertical bar; horizontal rules — a drawn line.

Before a single page is created, every character that will be drawn is tested against the embedded font. The built-in fonts encode WinAnsi: basic Latin plus common Western punctuation (curly quotes, em and en dashes, the bullet, the euro sign). A character outside that set — emoji, CJK, Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, arrows — is refused by name, with the reason and the fix, never dropped or drawn as a box. Because the wrapping and the drawing use the same measured text, what the tool measures is exactly what it draws.