How to convert text to PDF
- Type or paste your text, or open a .txt file (dropping it on the box works too).
- Choose the font, size, paper and margins. The preview of the first page updates as you go.
- Click Download file to save the PDF.
What the PDF looks like
The PDF is a plain document: your text in one font and size, in black, on A4 or US Letter pages. Lines wrap at the margins between words, and a word too long for a whole line (a long URL) is broken where it reaches the edge. Blank lines and spaces at the start of a line are kept, and tabs become spaces up to the next multiple of four, so lists and simple layouts look the way they do in your text editor.
The first non-empty line becomes the PDF’s title, which is what most readers show in the window or tab instead of the file name.
Standard fonts and file size
Helvetica, Times and Courier are three of the 14 standard fonts that every PDF reader must provide, so the PDF doesn’t have to carry the font inside it. That keeps a page of text to a few kilobytes and makes the text selectable and searchable. The trade-off is the character set: these fonts only cover the Windows-1252 set used for English and Western European languages. Rather than silently dropping characters, this tool tells you which ones it had to replace.
Paper sizes
A4 (210 × 297 mm) is the standard paper size almost everywhere outside North America. Letter (8.5 × 11 inches) is used in the United States, Canada and a few other countries. A PDF made for one prints fine on the other with “fit to page” turned on, but choosing the right one keeps the margins even. To combine the PDF with others afterwards, use merge PDF.