md2document
Tool

Markdown to PDF from VS Code, without the markdown-pdf extension

The popular VS Code Markdown-to-PDF extensions ship with Chromium under the hood — a 200MB download you don't need for clean documents. The browser path is faster and produces better-looking output for proposals, memos and reports.

Elia Kuratli
By Elia Kuratli
·3 min read
Open the converter

The VS Code workflow

  1. Open your .md file in VS Code.
  2. Cmd+A / Ctrl+A to select all. Cmd+C / Ctrl+C to copy.
  3. Open md2document.com in any browser.
  4. Paste into the editor. The PDF preview renders on the right.
  5. Pick a template and theme. Press Cmd+E / Ctrl+E to export.

What you trade off vs. an extension

The trade-off: there is one tab switch in the loop. What you gain: better defaults (cover page, ToC, page numbers, themes), a real live preview, no Chromium download, and a tool that you can also run from your phone or another machine.

If you want a one-click VS Code task

Add a task to .vscode/tasks.json that opens the converter in your browser. (You still paste manually — the converter intentionally does not accept files via URL parameters for privacy reasons.)

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