TXT to PDF Converter

Choose Courier if the alignment matters

This is the setting that decides whether the PDF is useful, and it depends entirely on what your text file is.

Courier is monospace — every character occupies exactly the same width. That is what keeps columns lined up. If your file is a log, a stack trace, a config file, a directory listing, source code, an ASCII table or anything where things are meant to sit above each other, Courier is the only choice that preserves it.

Helvetica and Times Roman are proportional — an i is narrower than a W. They read better for continuous prose, and they destroy any layout built out of spaces. A neatly aligned table in your text file becomes a ragged mess.

So: Courier for anything technical or tabular. Helvetica for notes, drafts and prose. Times Roman if the document wants to look formal.

Latin alphabet only — check this before you start

Worth knowing up front rather than discovering at the end.

The three fonts available use an encoding that covers the Latin alphabet, Western European accented characters and standard punctuation. It does not cover Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Thai or Devanagari.

If your text file contains those scripts, the conversion will stop with an error rather than produce a broken PDF. That is the better failure — a document full of question marks and empty boxes is worse than no document — but it does mean this tool cannot help with non-Latin text. For that you need something that can embed a font supporting your script, such as a full word processor's export.

Mixed files are worth checking too: a mostly-English log with a few customer names in another script will fail on those names.

If the line breaks look wrong

The tool works out where to wrap each line by estimating character width rather than measuring the actual rendered text. That is accurate enough for ordinary prose, and it drifts at the edges: a line of unusually wide characters can run slightly past the right margin, and unusually narrow text can wrap earlier than it needed to.

Two easy fixes when it looks off. Drop the font size by one step, which gives every line more room. Or choose wider margins, which reduces the line length the estimate has to get right. Either one usually settles it.

This matters most for long unbroken lines — a single log entry hundreds of characters long, or a URL with no spaces in it. Text with normal sentence lengths rarely shows the problem at all.

Real text, not a picture of text

The PDF is built with a PDF library and the words are written into it as text. That has consequences worth having.

You can search it with Ctrl+F in any reader. You can select and copy from it. Screen readers can read it. It indexes properly if it ends up on a website or in a document management system. And the file is small — text takes almost no space compared with an image.

That is not a given in this category. Tools that screenshot your text, or push it through the browser's print dialog, can produce a PDF where the words are pixels — it looks right and behaves like a photograph. Nothing is searchable and nothing can be copied out.

The other settings, briefly

Page size — A4 by default, Letter for North America, A5 for something pocket-sized or for a booklet.

Font size 10 to 16pt, defaulting to 11. Drop to 10 for a long log you want to keep to fewer pages; go to 14 or 16 if the document is to be read aloud or by someone who prefers larger type.

Line spacing single, 1.5 or double. 1.5 is the default and reads best on screen. Single fits far more on each page, which suits logs and reference material. Double leaves room for handwritten notes on a printout.

Page numbers are off by default and appear as 1 / 5 at the foot of each page when switched on, which is worth doing for anything over a couple of pages, especially if it will be printed.

Before the download, the tool tells you how many lines and pages it produced — a quick way to catch a setting that made the document far longer than expected.

Nothing is uploaded

The conversion happens on your own device. That matters more for text files than people assume, because of what they usually contain: server logs, database exports, application output, API responses, notes, drafts, and lists of names and addresses. Those are exactly the files that should not be handed to a free converter to process on its own servers and delete later.

Related tools

PDF to TXT Converter goes the other way, pulling the text back out of a PDF. Word to PDF handles a formatted .docx rather than plain text, and JPG to PDF builds a PDF out of images.