Markdown to PDF

How to turn Markdown into a PDF

Markdown is how notes, readme files, documentation and half the writing on the internet is actually written. It is comfortable to type and it is not comfortable to hand to somebody who does not know what a hash mark at the start of a line means.

1. Drop the .md file here, or paste the Markdown into the box.
2. Press Make the PDF.
3. Look at the first page, then save it.

What it understands

Headings from one hash to six, bold, italic, both together, inline code, links, pictures carried inside the file, bullet lists, numbered lists, block quotes, horizontal rules, fenced code blocks and pipe tables.

Struck-through text loses its line, because a PDF's built-in fonts cannot draw one through a word without measuring every letter. The words stay.

Why this conversion is a fair one

Markdown never says how big a heading is or what colour a link should be. It says only what a thing is. So unlike a Word document, there is no original appearance for this to fail to match: the typography is a judgement somebody has to make, and here it is made once, consistently, on an A4 page with ordinary margins.

Written here rather than borrowed

The reader is a few hundred lines in this site rather than a Markdown library, which would be a few hundred kilobytes downloaded by every visitor for the corners of the specification almost nobody types. If something you use is missing, it is missing on purpose or by oversight, not because a library refused.