When plain text to PDF is the right approach
Converting plain text directly to PDF is useful in specific scenarios: you have log output, code snippets, or terminal output you want to share as a non-editable document; you're generating a simple document from a script or API response where opening Word would be unnecessary overhead; or you have a Markdown or plain text file you want to share with someone who doesn't have a text editor configured to render it.
For documents that require rich formatting — headers, tables, images, precise typography — start in Word or a Markdown editor with export, not from plain text. The text-to-PDF path produces a monospaced or proportional-font document with no structural hierarchy beyond line breaks.
The line ending issue that breaks output
Windows uses CRLF (carriage return + line feed, ) line endings. Unix/macOS uses LF () only. If your text file was created on Windows and a converter only handles LF, the carriage return characters appear as ^M symbols or cause lines to overwrite each other in the output.
This tool normalizes line endings before converting, so both CRLF and LF input produce correct output. If you're using a script-based converter and see garbled output, add a normalization step: text.replace(/ /g, ' ') before passing text to the PDF generator.
Unicode and character encoding
Plain text files should be UTF-8 encoded for correct handling of non-ASCII characters (accented letters, Arabic, Chinese, emoji). If your PDF shows question marks or boxes where special characters should appear, the source file is likely Latin-1 or another legacy encoding. Re-save it as UTF-8 in your text editor before converting. The PDF font must also include the required Unicode ranges — a font that only covers Latin characters will not render Arabic or CJK text.