Text to PDF
Set a plain text file on paper, at a size and margin you choose.
Drop files here
Or paste them, or pick them from this device. Nothing is uploaded: the work happens in this tab.
Files in this tab
Nothing is loaded yet.
Options
What the PDF will be called.
A multiple of the text size. 1.4 is what a book uses.
Even word spacing; an uneven right edge.
Courier.
Advanced
A TrueType or OpenType font to set the text in. Needed for anything the built-in typefaces cannot draw — Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese. The file is read here, in this tab, and embedded in the PDF.
Make the PDF
Add a file to get started.
What this does
This sets a plain text file on paper properly: your choice of page size, margins, typeface, size and line spacing, with the lines broken at the measure rather than running off the edge. A form feed starts a new page, as it does on a printer. Nothing else in the file is treated as layout, because nothing else in a plain text file is.
What it will not do
Every tool here says what it cannot do, in its own words, before you rely on it.
- The file has to be UTF-8. A file saved in a legacy encoding arrives with its accented characters mangled, because nothing in it says which encoding that was.
- A line too long for the measure is broken where it reaches the edge rather than lost, which will fall mid-word.
- A form feed starts a new page, as it does on a printer. Nothing else in the file is layout.
- Text is set in the standard fonts every reader already carries, so the file renders identically on a machine that has none of your fonts installed. Anything they cannot draw needs a font file, which is embedded and subsetted into the PDF with it.
- A font file you supply is used for everything: bold, italic and monospaced text are all drawn in that one face rather than in a bold, italic or fixed-width cut of it. Code blocks and columns of figures lose their alignment as a result, so supply one only when the built-in fonts cannot draw your text.
- Shaping and joining come from the font itself, and nothing reorders a line: text is drawn in the order it is given, so a line mixing right-to-left and left-to-right writing comes out in that order rather than in reading order.
Questions people ask
My accented characters came out as nonsense.
The file is not UTF-8. Nothing inside a plain text file says which encoding it was saved in, so there is nothing to detect — re-save it as UTF-8 and it will be right.
Can I use my own font?
Yes, and you need one for any script the built-in typefaces cannot draw. The font file is read here in this tab and embedded, subsetted, into the PDF.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. The work happens in this browser tab, on your own machine. There is no server in this product to send a file to, which is why the promise is checkable rather than something you have to take on trust: open your browser's network panel and watch it do the work without making a request.
Is there a size limit, or a limit on how many files?
None that we impose. The limit is your own machine's memory, because that is where the work happens — a few hundred megabytes is comfortable on a laptop, and less on a phone. There is no daily task counter, no queue and no account.
What does it cost, and what is the catch?
Nothing, and there is no paid tier that unlocks features: the whole product is the free one. That is affordable because running it costs us nothing — your computer does the work — so there is no per-file cost to recover, no advertising and no data to sell.