How to convert text to a PDF

Printing a page to PDF gives you a PDF that looks like a printed page — the same narrow column, the same web typography, no page numbers, and headings that are only bold text. Converting text properly means deciding the page first and pouring the words into it.

What actually happens

Paste the text into the box, or drop a plain .txt or Markdown .md file on the panel, and press the button. What comes back is an ordinary PDF you can attach to an email, print or hand to someone else — not a screenshot of a text box, and not a file whose every paragraph is a single unbroken line.

The one thing it is not is a word processor. There is no cursor to place, no table to insert and no revision history. It does one job: it takes words that are already written and gives them a page.

Why not just print the page to PDF

Because you get the page you were looking at, with its own layout rules attached. The browser prints the column as it is drawn — usually narrower than a document would be, sized for a screen — and it has no idea that a heading should be a different size from the paragraph under it, or that page two should have a number at the foot of it.

The result is recognisably a web page on paper, which is fine for an archive and wrong for anything somebody is meant to read. A converted document is measured instead: margins you can write in, a line length a reader can follow, spacing between paragraphs, and page numbers if the document runs past one page.

Sinhala and Tamil, without installing anything

The usual way this goes wrong is not a missing font on your computer — it is a font that was never put inside the file. The PDF looks perfect on the machine that made it, because that machine has the font, and shows boxes or question marks on the machine that receives it, because that one does not. Nothing in the file said which font to use, so the reader on the other end guessed.

Here the font travels with the document. Sinhala and Tamil text is set in Noto Sans Sinhala and Noto Sans Tamil, and the shapes are arranged according to the script's own rules rather than drawn one character after another — which is the difference between a conjunct that reads correctly and a stack of disconnected strokes.

One honest caveat, because it is the kind of thing you only discover later: the page and the print are right, but copying a long Sinhala conjunct out of the finished PDF can occasionally come back as a slightly different character. That is a limitation of how PDFs store shaped Indic text, and it affects the clipboard, not the document.

Where the text can come from

Typing is the obvious answer, and pasting is the common one. Line breaks are kept, so a poem stays a poem and a list stays a list.

If what you have is a photograph rather than text, read it first with the image tool. That gives you the words in a box you can correct, and the text from it can go straight into this one — a photographed page becomes a laid-out document without anybody retyping the paragraphs in between. It is the same pair of steps either way: get the words right, then decide the page.

When a word processor is the better answer

If the document needs a table, an image, a logo, a header on every page, footnotes, or a colleague's comments in the margin, use a word processor. This tool will not do any of those, and pretending otherwise would waste your afternoon rather than mine.

It is worth being clear about which of those you actually need, though. Most documents that get opened in a word processor contain nothing but paragraphs and headings — and for those, a tool that starts from a correct page and never asks about fonts, templates or plugins gets to the finished file faster.

Questions

Can I edit the PDF once it is made?

Not in the way you would edit a document — a PDF is a finished page. Change the text in the box and download it again, which takes about as long as editing the PDF would have.

Will I need a Sinhala font installed on my computer?

No, and that is the point of doing it this way. The font is embedded in the file, so it renders the same on a machine that has never seen a Sinhala font as on yours.

Is the text selectable, or is it a picture of text?

Selectable, searchable and copyable. It is real text with real font outlines, not an image with letters drawn on it, so search in a PDF reader will find words in it.

Does it handle tables, columns or images?

No. Paragraphs, headings, bullets and page numbers only. Anything more structured belongs in a word processor, which will do a better job of it than this could.

What can I drop onto it?

Plain text and Markdown — .txt and .md. Those are the formats that carry words without carrying a layout as well, which is exactly what this tool wants to supply itself.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. The document is built in the browser tab and the file is handed straight back to you. There is no account, no queue, and nothing to delete afterwards.

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