How Plain Text, Markdown, and CSV Files Convert to PDF

TXT to PDF, Markdown to PDF, and CSV to PDF all build their output using the same layout engine, so they share the same fixed page format: US Letter size (612×792 points, 8.5×11 inches) with consistent margins. This is a text-flow renderer, not a layout-preserving one — it's built to lay text out cleanly, not to reproduce pixel-perfect formatting from the source file. Content automatically flows onto additional pages as it fills each one.

TXT to PDF treats each blank-line-separated block of your file as its own paragraph, collapses any extra whitespace within it, and renders it at a standard paragraph size. Markdown to PDF goes a step further: it runs your file through a real Markdown parser (the `marked` library's token lexer) and recognizes headings (#, ##, ###) and paragraphs specifically, rendering headings larger and bold. Everything else Markdown supports — lists, tables, links, images, code blocks — is intentionally not rendered; this tool's scope is headings and paragraph text, not full document layout.

CSV to PDF takes a different path: instead of flowing text into paragraphs, it draws your data as a ruled table with equal-width columns, using your file's first row as the header. If the table spans more than one page, the header row is redrawn at the top of each new page so a split table still reads correctly. Because every column is a fixed equal width, a cell whose content doesn't fit is truncated with an ellipsis rather than wrapped — wrapping one cell would push its row out of alignment with every other column.

One more shared detail worth knowing: the underlying PDF font (Helvetica) can only encode a specific character set. Curly quotes and em-dashes are automatically converted to straight quotes and double hyphens, bullet characters become plain hyphens, and any other character the font genuinely can't represent is rendered as a question mark. If your source file relies heavily on special typographic characters, this is the one place output can differ from the original.

As with every tool on PDFPilot, all three conversions happen entirely in your browser — your file is never uploaded to a server.