Export a draft as PDF

1. Open the document in the editor.
2. Open Export and choose PDF; there is a light theme and a dark one, so a piece written in dark mode does not print as a black page.
3. The PDF downloads with the document's title as the filename.

Free, in any modern browser, with no account. The conversion happens in the page — the document is not sent to a rendering service.

• An editor's inbox. A PDF opens the same way on every machine; a link opens a browser tab with someone else's fonts.
• A submission. Agents, magazines and grants ask for PDFs, often with the name in the file.
• Reading on paper. If somebody is going to print it and mark it up, this is the format they want.
• An attachment. Somewhere a link is not allowed — an email thread, a portal upload.

It prints the document as the document looks: the text, its headings, lists, quotes, code, tables and images, on pages that follow the width of the page rather than a design programme's grid. There are no running headers, page numbers or custom margins to set. If you need those, take the Markdown export into a typesetting tool and do the layout there.

The text layer is the reason this page exists: plenty of “save as PDF” routes in the browser produce an image of the page, which is unsearchable and unquotable. A PDF that cannot be copied from is a picture of a document.