CECO PDF

Text to PDF, from plain text or Markdown

Plain text, set to be read

Drop a .txt file on the convert page: notes, a log, a letter typed without formatting. It is set as real text, in a fixed-width typeface like a typewriter's, so whatever lines up in the file lines up on the page, and the PDF can be searched and copied from. A line too long for the page wraps onto the next one rather than being cut off, and the record counts how many did. A tab moves on to the next stop, as a terminal shows it, and a page-break character starts a new page.

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Markdown, with its formatting

A file whose name ends .md or .markdown is read as Markdown: its headings, bold and italic words, lists and lists within lists, quotes, tables, rules and code are set as such. Comments written into it, and the block of properties a note app or a site generator keeps at its top, are left out, as a Markdown reader leaves them out, and the record says so. A photo written into the file is drawn upright, as the phone meant, and what the camera noted beside it, such as where it was taken, is left out of the PDF. If a file's name says the wrong thing, you can choose to read any text file as Markdown, or a Markdown file as plain text.

Characters and encodings

The file is read as UTF-8 or UTF-16, or as the older encoding Windows used for Western European languages, and the record names the one it was read in. Text in another alphabet saved in an older encoding, Cyrillic or Greek say, is told apart by its words and refused rather than set in the wrong letters, so save it as UTF-8 first; a file of only a word or two may not be told apart that way. Polish or Slovak saved in an older encoding of its own is refused the same way, as its letters read there as symbols in the middle of words. Czech, Croatian or Turkish is read as Western European, and letters such as č, ř or ı come out as others, so save that as UTF-8 too. A file that is UTF-8 but for a few letters pasted in from an older one is refused, as it reads wrongly either way. Lines in Hebrew or Arabic are set right to left, from the right-hand margin. Emoji are drawn in one colour, in a typeface made for them, Noto Emoji, with their skin tones, flags and families; copied out of the PDF, an emoji may come back as other characters. A character none of the typefaces here can draw is not left as an empty box: the file is refused, and the character named, because a page that says less than its file is worse than none.

How much at once

One conversion takes up to 50 files, 32 MB of them in all, and each file up to the size your plan uploads. For more files, convert them in batches and join the PDFs with Merge PDF. The PDF it makes holds no more pages than your plan allows in one document.

The record

The PDF says how it was made, in the record it carries and in your account's trail. For each file it names the kind, the fingerprint, and the encoding it was read in, and how many of its lines were wrapped. The files you send are kept only until the conversion has answered; the PDF is kept with your documents like any other, and deleted after 90 days, or whenever you erase it. What a download costs is on the pricing page.

Other files into PDF

Every kind of file the converter takes, and what the PDF keeps of each, is on Convert to PDF.

And then