Markdown & HTML to PDF — and PDFs Back to ePub

Plain text and web pages are easy to write and terrible to hand to someone. PDF is the opposite — awkward to author, but it looks identical on every device and is what people expect to receive. These four tools bridge that gap in both directions, turning Markdown and HTML into polished documents, and turning fixed PDFs back into something readable on a phone.

Markdown in, PDF out

Writing in Markdown gives you plain text that diffs cleanly in git, opens in any editor and will still work in twenty years. What it does not give you is something to email a client.

Markdown to PDF renders headings, tables, code blocks and links into a clean document with readable default typography. It is a common workflow for READMEs, technical documentation, meeting notes and reports that live in a repository but need to reach people who do not.

The thing to watch is width. Very long code lines and tables with many columns can overflow, because a PDF page has a fixed width and cannot scroll sideways. Check anything code-heavy before sending it.

When you need control over the design

Markdown conversion uses sensible defaults, not your brand. When the output has to look like something specific, HTML to PDF is the better route — a real browser engine renders the page, so modern CSS including flexbox, grid and custom fonts behaves exactly as it would in Chrome.

That distinction matters. Converters that parse HTML themselves and approximate the layout fall apart on anything complex; rendering with an actual engine does not.

Two practical tips. Use the standard CSS print properties to control pagination — page-break-inside: avoid stops a table splitting across pages, and an @media print block lets you hide navigation and adjust spacing just for the PDF. And reference images with absolute URLs: relative paths will not resolve, because there is no surrounding site to resolve them against.

PDF to ePub — making documents readable on a phone

The problem with PDF on a small screen is that its page size is fixed. On a six-inch e-reader an A4 page either displays at unreadable size or demands constant panning and zooming.

PDF to ePub converts to a reflowable format, so text adapts to the screen and your chosen font size. That is the difference between a document you can technically open and one you can comfortably read.

Straightforward prose converts well. Complex layouts do not — multi-column academic papers and textbooks with sidebars can come out jumbled, because reflowing inherently discards the fixed arrangement. And a scanned PDF will not work at all until you run OCR on it first, since there is no text to reflow.

One long page instead of many

A different answer to the same reading problem: PDF Single Page merges the whole document into one continuous page, so scrolling is uninterrupted by page breaks. It suits comics, webtoons, and infographics that were awkwardly split across pages.

Two limits. You cannot sensibly print the result, since a printer either shrinks the enormous page onto one sheet or tiles it unpredictably. And very long documents produce a page so tall that some viewers struggle to render it smoothly. Keep your paginated original.

Choosing between them

Summary

Author in Markdown and export to PDF for speed, or build in HTML and render it when the design matters. Going the other way, ePub makes a fixed document readable on small screens, and a single continuous page suits anything meant to be scrolled rather than paged. All four run on our engine, and files are deleted immediately.