About MD→PDF

The story and the principles behind the tool

MD→PDF (at pdfheromd.com) is a small, focused tool that turns Markdown into a clean PDF — and a growing library of guides about doing that well. It exists because a very ordinary task turned out to be surprisingly annoying to do properly.

Why we built it

If you write in Markdown — notes, a README, a spec, meeting minutes, a résumé — you eventually have to hand someone a PDF. The obvious online converters ask you to upload your file to their server. For a shopping list that's fine. For an internal document, a contract draft, or anything with a client's name in it, it isn't. You shouldn't have to send a private document to a stranger's server just to change its format.

So we built a converter that does the whole job inside your browser, using the browser's own print engine. Your file never leaves your computer. There's no upload, no queue, no “your document is being processed” — it just renders and you save it as a PDF.

What makes it different

Private by default. The document is processed on your device. We never receive it, so we can't lose it, leak it, or mine it.
It handles the hard parts. GitHub-flavored tables, fenced code with syntax highlighting, task lists, and CJK text (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) — the things that quietly break in a lot of converters — all come through.
Real PDF text. The output is selectable, searchable, vector text, not a screenshot of your document.
No account, no friction. Open the page and use it. There's nothing to sign up for.

How it stays free

The tool is free and we intend to keep it that way. The site is supported by a single, unobtrusive ad, and by an optional one-time payment for people who'd rather browse ad-free. That's the whole business model — no subscriptions, no selling data (we don't have your data to sell), no upsells buried in the workflow.

The guides

Alongside the tool we write practical guides about converting Markdown to PDF: how the format actually works, how to keep tables and code and non-Latin text intact, how to do it from the command line with Pandoc, and how to handle specific cases like résumés, READMEs, and page breaks. They're written to be genuinely useful — the kind of answer we wished we'd found the first time we hit each problem. You can browse them from the home page.

Who's behind it