Text to PDF

Text to PDF turns plain text into a real PDF document you can download, print or send. Paste a note, a list, a draft, a receipt, a code snippet or a block of copy, and the tool lays it out onto A4 or Letter pages with word wrapping, then gives you the file. It is for the everyday job of getting text out of a text box and into something that looks like a document and prints correctly. The layout runs entirely inside your browser tab, so nothing you paste is uploaded anywhere.

You choose the page size and two things that control the page: the font size and the margin. A4 is 210 × 297 mm (595.28 × 841.89 points) and Letter is 8.5 × 11 in (612 × 792 points); 1 point is 1/72 of an inch. The margin is the clearance on all four sides, in points — 72 pt is one inch, so it is the usual default. The font size is the height of the text in points; 11 or 12 pt is ordinary body text. Only one built-in font is used, Helvetica, which keeps output small and needs no font files.

Wrapping and paging are done by the tool, not by you. A line is broken between words so it never crosses the right margin; a word you deliberately put on its own line (an explicit line break) starts a new line; a word wider than the whole column — a long URL, an unbroken identifier — is split across lines rather than running off the page. When the next line would pass the bottom margin, a new page begins. Line spacing is fixed at one and a half times the font size (12 pt text steps 18 pt between baselines), which is why the number of lines a page holds is predictable: 39 lines fit an A4 page at 12 pt with 72 pt margins, and 36 fit a Letter page. Blank lines are kept as gaps, and consecutive spaces are collapsed to one. Nothing is centred or justified — the text is flush left, one column.

Because the PDF is created fresh, the text is real, selectable, searchable text (not an image), so you can copy from it in any reader and it will show up in search. The one limit to know before you start: the built-in font covers the WinAnsi character set only — Latin letters including Western European accents (é, ü, ñ), digits and common punctuation such as curly quotes, the em dash and the euro sign — but not Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Greek, Devanagari, mathematical symbols such as ≤ or ∞, or emoji. If your text contains one of those, the tool tells you exactly which character it is and stops, rather than dropping it or printing an empty box. For those scripts you would need a tool that embeds a full Unicode font.

This is a one-way, one-shot converter: it does not read an existing PDF, and it does not offer bold, italics, headings, tables, images, colours or alignment — plain text only, in black. If you need to number the pages, use Add Page Numbers to PDF on the result; if you need to join it with other files, use Merge PDF. Everything runs on your own device, and the page's Network tab will show that no request carries your text.

1. The text is tidied without changing the words: Windows and old-Mac line endings and the Unicode line separators become plain line breaks, tabs and fixed-width spaces become ordinary spaces, and trailing blank lines are dropped. 2. The settings are validated — page size A4 or Letter, font size 6–72 pt, margin 0–200 pt — and the text must not be empty or longer than 1,000,000 characters. 3. The text column is page width minus twice the margin. Each paragraph (split on line breaks) is wrapped word by word: words are joined with single spaces and a line is closed as soon as adding the next word would pass the column width. A single word wider than the column is broken character by character. 4. Page capacity is computed from the page height, the two margins and the line step (font size × 1.5): capacity = floor((height − 2 × margin − full glyph height) ÷ line step) + 1, so the descender of the last line stays above the bottom margin. The wrapped lines are then cut into pages of that many lines. 5. The wrapped lines are checked character by character against the embedded font, and any character outside the WinAnsi set is refused by name before anything is drawn. 6. Each page is created and each line is drawn at x = margin with its baseline at page height − margin − ascender, dropping by the line step for each following line, in black Helvetica. The document is saved as document.pdf and returned to the browser.