Text to PDF

How to use Text to PDF

1. Type or paste your text into the box, or open a .txt or .md file.
2. Choose a page size, orientation, margins, font, font size and line spacing. Add a title and page numbers if you want them.
3. Check the live page count and any notice about characters that cannot be drawn.
4. Press Download PDF.

What this tool is good for

Plain text is the simplest format there is, but it is not always accepted. Many portals ask for a PDF, printers prefer a fixed page size, and a PDF looks the same on every device. Typical uses include saving meeting notes, log excerpts, source code listings, poems, letters, recipes and exported chat transcripts as documents you can attach or archive.

Choosing Courier keeps columns of text aligned, which suits code and tables made with spaces. Helvetica or Times reads more comfortably for letters and prose.

How the layout works

The page is divided into a text area by your margins. Each line of text is measured with the font’s own character widths and broken at spaces so that nothing runs past the right margin. The number of lines per page is the usable height divided by the font size multiplied by the line spacing, rounded down so that no line is clipped. Page numbers and a heading reserve their own space, so they never overlap the text.

For example, an A4 page with one-inch margins and 12 point text at 1.2 line spacing holds 48 lines, so a 100-line file needs three pages.

• Narrow margins and a smaller font fit more text per page.
• Line spacing of 1.15 to 1.5 suits most reading.
• Use Letter or Legal for documents going to North American printers.

Limits and privacy

This is a text converter, not a word processor. There is no bold or italic in the body, no images, no links and no automatic table of contents. Text up to about five million characters is accepted, though very long documents take a moment to lay out.

Your text is turned into a PDF inside your browser. It is never sent anywhere, so private notes stay on your device.

Why use this text to pdf tool

• Proper wrapping and pagination. Lines are wrapped using the real width of the chosen font, long words are broken only when they cannot fit, and text flows to the next page before it reaches the bottom margin.
• Three built-in fonts. Helvetica, Times and Courier are standard PDF fonts that every viewer has, so the file opens the same everywhere and stays small.
• Live page count. The page total is calculated with exactly the same layout used for the download, so what you see is the number of pages you get.
• Honest handling of unsupported characters. Characters outside the fonts’ Western European range are replaced by a question mark, and you are told how many were changed and which ones.

Frequently asked questions

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