Text to PDF – Create a PDF from Plain Text

How to turn text into a PDF

1. Type or paste your text into the box. Blank lines are kept, so paragraphs stay separated.
2. Choose a font size: 10, 12 (default), 14, 16, 18 or 24 points.
3. Set the margin in points. It applies to all four sides; values from 10 to 100 are accepted and the default is 50. For reference, 72 points is one inch (25.4 mm), so 50 points is about 17.6 mm.
4. Press Generate PDF.
5. Download document.pdf.

How the PDF is built

Everything happens in your browser with the open-source pdf-lib library. The tool creates an A4 portrait page (210 × 297 mm, or 595.28 × 841.89 points) and uses Helvetica, one of the standard fonts that every PDF reader provides. Your text is split into paragraphs at each line break and into words at spaces. Words are added to a line as long as the measured width fits between the margins; then a new line starts. Lines are spaced at 1.5 times the font size, and when the next line would run into the bottom margin, a new page begins. The text is drawn in black, left-aligned, and remains real text: you can select, search and copy it in the finished PDF.

With the default 50-point margin, a page holds this many lines:

Which characters work

The built-in Helvetica font uses the Windows-1252 character set. That covers English and most Western European languages (é, ü, ß, ñ, ø), curly quotes, dashes, the bullet • and the € sign. It does not cover Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic or Greek, Central European letters such as ł or č, or emoji. If your text contains one of these, the tool shows an error naming the character; remove or replace it, or use one of the alternatives below.

Tips

• Plain text only: bold, headings and bullet formatting pasted from a word processor are lost; bullet characters themselves still print.
• Spacing collapses: indentation, tabs and runs of spaces become single spaces, so column-aligned text and code will not line up.
• Break up long strings: a very long URL or word with no spaces is not split and can run past the right margin.
• Letters and reports read well at 12 pt with 50–72 pt margins; dense notes fit more per page at 10 pt.
• Keep a copy of your text. The page does not save it, and reloading clears the box.

Good for

• Turning notes, a letter or a list into a file you can print or attach.
• Saving a plain-text email, log or transcript as a PDF for your records.
• Making a quick cover or separator page to put in front of other files with Merge PDF.
• Converting a .txt file: open it in any editor, copy everything and paste it here.

Limitations and alternatives

• A4 portrait only; no US Letter or landscape option. A4 prints on Letter paper with "Fit to page".
• One font (Helvetica), one color, left alignment; no headings, images, page numbers or headers and footers.
• Characters outside Windows-1252 cannot be used.
• Alternatives: for formatting or any language, write in Word, Google Docs or LibreOffice and export as PDF. For a .txt file in any language, open it in your browser and use Print → Save as PDF, which uses your system fonts.

Related tools

• PDF to TextGet the text out of an existing PDF.
• Merge PDFPut your new page in front of other documents.
• Add WatermarkMark the generated document as a draft.
• Compress PDFRe-save a PDF more compactly.