TXT to PDF
Turn a Notepad .txt file into a PDF with selectable text, exactly as written
Your files stay with you. Conversion happens inside the browser; no file is ever uploaded to a server.
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How it works
A common case: a log file from a program, meeting notes kept in Notepad or a .txt attachment has to be sent somewhere as a PDF. Tap or click the box, choose the file and press Convert to PDF. Every line is carried over as it is; a line too long for the paper wraps at a word, and blank lines stay blank. The result line tells you what happened, for example "3 pages · Letter · read as UTF-8". If an older Windows program saved the file, curly quotes, the euro sign and accented letters are stored in the Windows-1252 code page; the tool notices this and prints them correctly. Characters the font does not contain, such as Chinese script or emoji, are counted in the result line so nothing disappears silently.
This tool is also known as txt to pdf, text to pdf, convert notepad to pdf, txt file to pdf, plain text to pdf converter.
What is TXT (plain text file)?
A .txt file holds nothing but characters and line breaks: no bold, no fonts, no margins and no page size. Notepad, TextEdit in plain-text mode, program logs and many device exports use it. That is why the same file looks slightly different on every computer. Converting it to PDF fixes the paper size, font size and line breaks, so the document opens the same way everywhere and prints predictably.
What is Character encoding (UTF-8 and Windows-1252)?
Computers store letters as numbers, and the encoding decides which number means which letter. UTF-8 covers every language and is today's default. Older Windows programs saved Western text as Windows-1252, often labeled ANSI: there the euro sign or é is a single byte, and opening such a file as UTF-8 shows broken symbols. This tool tries UTF-8 first, falls back to Windows-1252 when the bytes are not valid UTF-8, and names the encoding it used.
What is the difference between TXT to PDF and Markdown to PDF?
The Markdown converter reads your text as formatting instructions: a line starting with # becomes a heading, words between two asterisks turn bold, and lines starting with a dash become bullets. The TXT converter interprets nothing; whatever is in the file is printed on the page. Use this tool for program output, logs, poems or notes that happen to contain asterisks and hashes. If you wrote a document with headings and lists in Markdown, the Markdown converter gives a cleaner result.
Spacing and column alignment
Indentation at the start of a line and runs of spaces between words are kept in the PDF, and tab characters expand to stops every four columns, as in Notepad. The font used in the PDF is not monospaced, though: an "i" is narrower than an "m". A table or program output lined up with spaces may therefore shift by a few letters; nothing is lost, the columns just do not line up to the millimeter.
If the file contains a page break character (form feed), a new page starts there. Old printer output and some accounting exports separate pages this way.
What if letters come out wrong?
The tool first looks for an encoding mark (BOM) at the start of the file; without one it tries UTF-8. If a byte breaks the UTF-8 rules, it assumes the file was saved as Windows-1252, the old Western European setting. Almost every English, German, French or Spanish text file is read correctly one of these two ways, and the result line says which one was used.
If the file was saved in another legacy encoding, such as Cyrillic or Greek, letters may look wrong. In that case reopen it in Notepad, use Save As with UTF-8 as the encoding and convert that copy.
Frequently asked questions
How do I convert a TXT file to PDF?
Choose your .txt file on this page and press Convert to PDF. The PDF is made in your browser and lands in your Downloads folder; no upload and no account are needed.
Can I copy text from the PDF?
Yes. The text is written as characters, not as a picture, so you can select, copy and search it in any PDF reader.
Can I combine several TXT files into one PDF?
This tool makes one PDF per text file. If you need a single document, run the resulting PDFs through the PDF merge tool in the order you want.
Is my file uploaded to a server?
No. Reading the text file and building the PDF both happen inside your browser; the file never leaves this page.