Text to PDF

How to turn a text file into a PDF

A text file is the plainest thing a computer can hold, which is exactly why it travels badly. It has no page, no margin and no font, so it opens looking different on every machine and prints looking like nothing at all. A PDF gives it a page.

1. Drop the .txt file on the box, or paste the words into the space under it.
2. Look at what was found.
3. Press Make the PDF and look at the first page.
4. Press Save the PDF.

Where the paragraphs go

A blank line starts a new paragraph. A single line break inside a paragraph is not honoured, because a text file wrapped at 72 characters would otherwise come out ragged down the middle of an A4 page - the words are re-wrapped to the width of the page instead.

There is one exception. A file that looks like a listing - many short lines, a lot of them indented, the shape of code or of a log - keeps every line break exactly where it is, because in that kind of file the line breaks are the meaning.

The one exact conversion on this site

Every other conversion here involves letting something go, because the original had a layout and we cannot reproduce it without the software that made it. A text file has no layout to lose. What you get is what the file says, set well on a page, and there is nothing to compare it against unfavourably.