Convert Notepad Plain Text to Clean PDF
Paste notepad text or import a .txt file, choose simple PDF layout settings, and download a clean PDF document.
Written by Anil Gautam · Updated
How does Text to PDF handle line breaks?
For text you type or paste, a blank line starts a new paragraph. Single line breaks inside a paragraph become spaces and the text is rewrapped to the page width, which repairs text copied from emails or PDFs that breaks in mid-sentence. Spaces at the start and end of each paragraph are trimmed, so an indent typed with spaces disappears. One empty line of space follows every paragraph.
The same rule joins lines you wanted kept apart. An address typed on three lines, Maria Lopez, 18 Hill Road and Springfield 12345, with single breaks between them, prints as 'Maria Lopez 18 Hill Road Springfield 12345' on one line. Put a blank line between the lines to keep them apart, at the cost of a gap, or save the text as a .txt file and convert it with Word to PDF, which keeps every line where it is.
What happens when you import a .txt file?
Import .txt replaces everything in the text box with the file's contents and sets the document title to the file name without its extension, so meeting-notes.txt gets the title meeting-notes and downloads as meeting-notes.pdf. Importing a second file replaces the first, so to combine two files, paste their text into the box with a blank line between them. The file is read as UTF-8. A file saved in an older encoding, such as ANSI from an older version of Windows Notepad, can show broken characters where accented letters were, so save it again as UTF-8 first. You can edit the imported text in the box before making the PDF.
Which characters print correctly in the PDF?
The PDF uses Helvetica, one of the standard fonts every PDF reader has built in, so no font is embedded and the file stays small. Its character set covers English and Western European letters, curly quotes, dashes and the euro sign. The rupee sign and Devanagari are missing, so a line containing ₹ or Hindi text comes out as garbled characters. Write Rs. 500 instead of ₹500, and make Hindi documents in a word processor that embeds a Hindi font.
Font size runs from 9 to 22 and margins from 8 to 36 mm, with A4, Letter or Legal pages in either orientation. Raising the size from the default 12 to 16 cuts a full A4 page from 52 lines to 39. The Make PDF button stays disabled until the box holds something other than spaces.