Convert text to PDF

How to turn text into a PDF

1. Type or paste your text into the editor above, or drop a .txt, .log, .csv or .md file to load its contents.
2. Choose a font, size, line height, page size and margin. The counters show the words, lines and characters you are about to typeset.
3. Turn on page numbers if the document is long enough to need them.
4. Set the file name, press Create PDF, and download.

Choosing a font

All three are part of the PDF standard's base 14 fonts, so they are never embedded in the file. A fifty-page document typically comes out under 100 KB, and it renders identically in every reader on every operating system.

How the text is laid out

Word wrapping uses the real metrics of the chosen font rather than a character count, so lines fill the column properly instead of breaking early or overflowing. Specifically:

• Words break at spaces, and the line is filled greedily up to the column width.
• A single token wider than the entire column — a long URL, a base64 blob, a checksum — is split by character so it can never run off the edge of the page.
• Hard line breaks in your input are respected exactly, which is what keeps logs, poetry and code readable.
• Blank lines become vertical space, so paragraphs stay visually separated.
• Tabs are expanded to four spaces, because PDF has no tab stops of its own.
• When the cursor reaches the bottom margin a new page begins automatically; page numbers, if enabled, are stamped afterwards once the total is known.

Margins and readability

A comfortable line length is roughly 60 to 80 characters. On A4 at 11 pt Helvetica, a 20 mm margin gives about 85 characters per line — fine for reference material, slightly long for sustained reading. If the document is meant to be read start to finish, either raise the margin to 30 mm or keep 20 mm and increase the font to 12 pt. Line height matters just as much: 1.4 to 1.5 is right for body text, while 1.15 to 1.25 suits dense logs where you want more on each page.

Which characters can be used

The standard PDF fonts are encoded with WinAnsi, covering the Latin alphabet, accented Western European letters, curly quotes, en and em dashes, the euro sign and common symbols. Characters outside that set — Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, CJK, emoji — cannot be drawn without embedding a font file. Rather than failing, the converter transliterates what it safely can (stripping diacritics, mapping arrows and mathematical operators to ASCII equivalents) and then reports exactly how many characters it had to replace, so you can decide whether the output is fit for purpose.

Good reasons to make a PDF from text

• Sending something that must not be edited or reflowed — a quote, a statement, a set of instructions.
• Printing plain text properly, with real margins and page breaks rather than a browser's print stylesheet.
• Attaching logs to a ticket in a format that opens the same way for everyone.
• Archiving notes in a self-contained format that will still open in twenty years.
• Producing a clean handout from notes without opening a word processor.

Writing in Markdown? Markdown to PDF keeps your headings, lists and code blocks. Need the reverse direction? Use PDF to Text.