In short
To convert Markdown to PDF, paste the Markdown, pick a paper size, then choose Save as PDF and select "Save as PDF" as the destination in the print dialog. The page is rendered to HTML with print CSS and handed to the browser's own PDF engine, so the text stays selectable and searchable, links keep working, and the file has no watermark.
| How the PDF is made | Your browser's print engine, from HTML with print stylesheets |
|---|---|
| Text quality | Real selectable, searchable text — not a rasterised image |
| Paper sizes | A4, Letter, Legal, A5, portrait or landscape |
| Margins | Narrow (12.7 mm), Normal (20 mm), Wide (31.75 mm) |
| Page breaks | Headings stay with their text; code blocks and table rows avoid splitting |
| Watermark | None |
| Privacy | The file never leaves your device |
How the PDF is produced
Most online Markdown-to-PDF tools either send your text to a server or rasterize the page into an image and wrap it in a PDF. The first means your document leaves your machine; the second gives you a PDF where you can't select or search the text and file sizes balloon.
This converter renders your Markdown to clean HTML with print-specific CSS, then hands it to your browser's own PDF engine. Click Save as PDF, and in the dialog that opens choose Save as PDF (Chrome, Edge, Brave), PDF in the destination list (Firefox), or the PDF menu in the bottom-left corner (Safari). The result has real text, working links, correct page breaks before headings, and code blocks that don't split across pages.
Tips for a better-looking PDF
- Start with a single
#heading — it becomes the document title and the file name. - Use
##for sections. Each section heading is kept together with the paragraph that follows it. - Long tables wrap rather than overflow the page; keep columns to five or six for A4 or Letter.
- Images are included when they are reachable by URL (for example, raw GitHub links). Local file paths can't be resolved by a browser.
- In the print dialog you can switch between A4 and Letter, set margins, and turn off headers and footers (the date and URL) for a cleaner page.
Common uses
Turning a project README into a hand-out, exporting Obsidian or Logseq notes for a client, submitting an assignment written in Markdown, producing a printable changelog, or archiving a ChatGPT research answer as a PDF you can attach to an email.
Markdown to PDF from the command line instead
If you convert many files regularly, pandoc notes.md -o notes.pdf (with a LaTeX or wkhtmltopdf backend installed) or the md-to-pdf npm package are the usual choices. For a one-off document, the browser route above is quicker and needs nothing installed.