Markdown is the default writing format for technical documentation, README files, project wikis, and personal notes. Converting a Markdown file to PDF makes it easy to share with people who don't use the same tools, to attach to a ticket or email, or to archive a snapshot of a document that would otherwise require a running web server to read.
Methods for converting Markdown to PDF
There are three common paths: Pandoc with LaTeX, a browser's built-in print function, and an online converter.
Pandoc is the command-line tool that technical writers swear by. It produces publication-quality output through LaTeX — correct hyphenation, beautiful typography, and support for academic citation formats. The cost is the installation: Pandoc itself is straightforward, but the LaTeX distribution it depends on can be hundreds of megabytes. For teams working on documents regularly, it is worth the setup. For a one-off conversion, it is not.
The browser print method is the fastest: open the Markdown file in a browser that renders it (GitHub does this, as do many browser extensions), then use File → Print → Save as PDF. The output is readable but styled by the browser or extension, not by you.
Online converters — like Filum — sit between these two. They parse the Markdown server-side using a GFM-compatible parser (GitHub Flavoured Markdown), render it to HTML, and pass the HTML to Chromium for PDF generation. The result is a clean, readable document with correct code blocks, tables, and lists, without any installation.
What Markdown syntax is preserved
Filum's Markdown to PDF tool uses marked v18, a GFM-compatible parser. The following are all rendered correctly in the PDF: headings (h1–h6), paragraphs and line breaks, bold and italic text, inline code and fenced code blocks (with the language tag displayed), unordered and ordered lists, nested lists, blockquotes, horizontal rules, links, tables (GFM table syntax), and images embedded as base64 data URIs.
Syntax that is not supported: LaTeX math notation (\[...\] or $...$), Mermaid diagrams, footnotes (non-GFM), and images referenced by URL. The last point is the most common source of confusion — images linked by URL are not loaded because the conversion runs in a server sandbox without public internet access.
Getting images into the PDF
External image URLs are blocked. To include an image in the converted PDF, it must be embedded as a base64 data URI in the Markdown source. The syntax is: .
Most Markdown editors and build tools can do this automatically. In Obsidian, use the 'Embedded attachment' setting. In Pandoc, pass --standalone which embeds referenced images. In VS Code, the Markdown All in One extension can convert image links to data URIs.
If including images is not critical, converting Markdown that contains only text, code, and tables produces excellent output without any pre-processing.
When to use Pandoc instead
Filum's tool is the right choice for: README files, documentation drafts, notes and reports, any Markdown file where you need a PDF in the next five minutes without installing anything.
Pandoc is the right choice for: academic papers with citations and LaTeX math, documents where precise typographic control matters (custom fonts, exact margins, headers and footers), and projects where consistent automated PDF generation is part of a build pipeline. Pandoc's --template option lets you define every aspect of the output.