Markdown to PDF, without uploading the document

Most Markdown-to-PDF converters post your text to a server and send a file back. Markbeam renders the PDF in the page you are already looking at, so the document never leaves the browser — and the pages break where a person would break them.

Exporting

1. Open or paste your Markdown.
2. Click Export in the toolbar and pick PDF — or press Ctrl+S, which goes straight there.
3. The button counts pages as it works; the file downloads when it reaches the last one.

Long documents take a moment: roughly 3 seconds for 18 pages, 5 for 35, 20 for 69 on an ordinary laptop. That time is rasterisation, and it is spent on your machine rather than queued behind other people's documents on someone's server.

Why the page breaks are the interesting part

A naive export slices the document every A4-height of pixels, which cuts headings in half and splits table rows across pages. Markbeam measures the rendered blocks first and chooses boundaries that fall between them, so a heading travels with the paragraph under it and a code block stays whole. A block taller than a page is split, because there is nowhere else to put it.

Diagrams are converted to bitmaps before the page is drawn, which is what stops the right-hand side of a wide Mermaid diagram from being clipped — an artefact of how rasterisers handle inline SVG rather than anything about your document.

What the PDF looks like

• Always light. The export forces the light theme even if you are working in the dark one, because a dark PDF prints as a black rectangle.
• Fixed width. Output does not depend on where you left the split divider — the same document gives the same PDF.
• Links survive, including a [TOC], whose entries become internal jumps to the right page.
• Custom preview CSS is excluded, deliberately: that export re-parses the stylesheet, and a rule its renderer cannot read produces a blank document rather than an error. Better to exclude it and say so than to hand you a white PDF.

Other ways out

Ctrl+P prints the document rather than the app — no toolbar, no editor pane, light background whatever theme you use. There is also standalone HTML with its styles inlined, Word (.doc), the original Markdown, and one landscape page per slide if the document is a deck. If you only need to read the file first, start with the viewer.