Text to PDF Converter

Plenty of writing starts as plain text: meeting notes typed into a phone, a speech drafted in a notes app, a list of instructions for a house sitter, a reading summary written in Markdown. Text files are quick to write and open everywhere, but they look unfinished when printed, with lines that run the full width of the paper and no margins to speak of.

A PDF gives the same words the shape of a document. The text is wrapped inside proper margins and the file looks the same whether the reader opens it on a laptop, a phone or a printer at the library. It also travels better: email clients and chat apps show a preview of a PDF, and nobody's editor reformats it.

Saving text as a file is the one extra step. On a computer, any plain-text editor will do; on a phone, most notes apps can share or export a note as a .txt file. Once it is a file, drop it on the box above.

The converter reads two kinds of text file differently. A .txt file is treated as plain text: what you see in the editor is what goes on the page, including asterisks, hash signs and indents. A .md file is treated as Markdown, the lightweight formatting language used by note apps, wikis and code repositories, so a line starting with a hash becomes a heading and words between asterisks become bold or italic.

Headings in Markdown do one more useful thing: they become bookmarks in the PDF sidebar. A long study guide or a set of meeting minutes with a heading per topic can then be read by section. The options below decide how the pages themselves look.

If you are not sure which one you have, look at the end of the file name. Notes exported from apps such as Obsidian or Bear are usually .md, while Notepad and most phone exports produce .txt. Renaming a .txt file to .md is a quick way to have its headings and lists formatted, provided the text already uses Markdown symbols.

Text files written in any language convert, as long as they are saved in a standard encoding such as UTF-8, the encoding used by almost every modern editor. Accented letters, Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese and Korean text is printed with embedded fonts, so the PDF shows the same characters on any device.

If the original text came from an old program and shows odd symbols in place of accented letters, the file was probably saved in an older regional encoding. Open it in an editor that lets you pick the encoding, save it again as UTF-8, and convert the new copy. For logs, code and other .txt files whose line breaks must stay exactly as written, see TXT to PDF. Word, Excel and slide files go through Convert to PDF in the same way.

The PDF keeps the file name of the text file, so name your notes before you convert them. A batch of 20 files becomes 20 PDFs, each deleted from the server 30 minutes after it is ready.