How to turn plain text into a PDF
- Supply the text
Upload a .txt file or paste into the box.
- Set the type
11pt suits continuous prose. Drop to 9pt for something dense you will annotate by hand.
- Switch to monospaced if it is code
Alignment survives; readability of prose suffers. Choose accordingly.
- Create the PDF
Pagination, margins and wrapping are handled for you.
Why this matters for exam and study documents
Extract a mark scheme with PDF to Text, edit out everything you have already learned, and set the remainder here at 9pt. What comes back is a condensed revision sheet in your own words and no one else's layout.
What is kept, what changes, and what this will not do
Everything produced here is an image of a page. That is what makes it portable and what makes it unsearchable, and the two are the same property seen from different sides.
Kept
- Every character, including line breaks and indentation
- Reading order and paragraph structure
Changed
- Plain text has no formatting to preserve - there is no bold, italic or heading to lose
- Very long words are broken across lines rather than running off the page
- Non-Latin scripts may not render in the built-in fonts
Limits
- Accented Latin text is fine; Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and CJK scripts are not supported by the built-in fonts.
Questions and answers
Can I convert Markdown?
It will be set as literal text, with the asterisks and hashes visible. Nothing here interprets Markdown formatting.
Why is my table misaligned?
Because a proportional font gives every character a different width. Tick the monospaced box and the columns line up.
Can I convert a Word document here?
No. Word documents carry styles, tables and images that plain-text conversion cannot represent, and pretending otherwise would produce a worse document than Word's own export. Use File, Save as PDF in Word.