Guides
Practical, tested walkthroughs for converting documents to PDF, and honest fixes for the errors that get in the way.
Jupyter notebooks
- Fix: nbconvert failed because xelatex was not found on PATH
jupyter nbconvert --to pdf fails with: xelatex not found on PATH
- Convert a Jupyter notebook to PDF without LaTeX
export .ipynb to PDF without installing a LaTeX / TeX distribution
- How to save a Jupyter notebook as a PDF (VS Code, JupyterLab, Colab)
save/export a .ipynb notebook to PDF from whichever environment you use
- How to download a Google Colab notebook as a PDF
export / download a Google Colab notebook to PDF, since Colab has no one-click PDF button
- What is an .ipynb file?
understand what a .ipynb file is, what's inside it, and how to open or convert it
- Fix: matplotlib charts missing from a notebook PDF
matplotlib plots are missing / blank when a Jupyter notebook is exported to PDF
- Fix: Unicode and CJK characters break nbconvert PDF export
Chinese/Japanese/Korean or other Unicode characters are missing, show as boxes, or crash nbconvert PDF export
Markdown
- Markdown to PDF: Pandoc vs an online converter (honest comparison)
choosing between Pandoc and a browser converter for markdown to PDF
- Why mermaid diagrams don't render in PDF (and how to fix it)
mermaid diagrams appear as raw code instead of rendered diagrams when exporting Markdown to PDF
- Rendering LaTeX math in Markdown PDF exports
math in Markdown ($...$) shows as raw text or fails to render when exporting to PDF
Comparisons
- PDFMoka vs CloudConvert
an honest, disclosed comparison of a client-side and a server-side converter