Text to PDF

Plain text is everywhere: meeting notes, server logs, chat exports, subtitle files, configuration files, transcripts. It opens anywhere but prints badly, with lines running off the edge and no page numbers. A PDF fixes that and makes the text easy to share, archive and annotate. This tool keeps every line break and indent exactly as written.

Two fonts for two jobs

Readable uses Roboto, a clear proportional font. Choose it for notes, transcripts, letters and anything meant to be read. It covers Latin, Greek and Cyrillic letters.

Monospace uses Courier, where every character has the same width. Choose it for:

• logs and command output, where columns line up,
• source code and configuration files, where indentation matters,
• tables drawn with spaces, and ASCII art.

Courier is one of the standard fonts every PDF reader has built in, so the file stays tiny, but it only covers Western European characters. If your text contains anything else, the tool stops with a clear message instead of printing question marks; switch to Readable.

Line numbers for reviews

For code reviews, log analysis and legal transcripts, turn on Line numbers. Each line starts with its number in grey, right-aligned, so “see line 1,204” is easy to find on paper. Wrapped long lines keep a single number, so the numbering matches your editor.

Several files in one PDF

Open more than one file and they are combined into one PDF in the order of the list; use the arrows to reorder. Each file starts on a new page, and with File name above each file on, its name appears as a heading. This is handy for bundling the logs of one incident or the chapters of a transcript.

Encodings and old files

Text files don’t say which character set they use. The tool reads them as UTF-8, today’s standard. Files saved by older Windows programs often use the Windows Western European encoding instead, which turns é into a garbled character in UTF-8. When a file clearly isn’t valid UTF-8, the tool reads it with that older encoding, which fixes most accented characters automatically.

Page setup

• Text size: 11 pt for reading; 9 pt in landscape fits about 130 characters of a log line.
• Margins: narrow for logs, normal for documents, wide when the printout will be annotated.
• Page numbers: “3 / 12” at the bottom centre.

A worked example: an incident log

1. Open server.log and worker.log from the same incident.
2. Choose Monospace, 9 pt, landscape, line numbers and file names.
3. Create the PDF and attach it to the incident report; reviewers can refer to file and line.

Related tools

For formatted documents with headings and tables, write Markdown and use Markdown to PDF. To get text back out of a PDF, use PDF to Text. For quick edits before converting, the Online Notepad keeps text in your browser.

When the output looks wrong

• Lines run off into a second line everywhere: the text is wider than the page. Switch to landscape, reduce the text size to 9 pt or choose narrow margins.
• Columns don’t line up: the Readable font has letters of different widths. Choose Monospace for anything aligned with spaces.
• Strange symbols instead of accents: the file uses an unusual encoding. Open it in a text editor, save it as UTF-8 and convert it again.
• Very long files are slow: text documents of a few thousand pages work, but take a while to lay out; split huge logs into parts first.