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 PATHjupyter nbconvert --to pdf fails with: xelatex not found on PATH
- Convert a Jupyter notebook to PDF without LaTeXexport .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 PDFexport / 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 PDFmatplotlib plots are missing / blank when a Jupyter notebook is exported to PDF
- Fix: Unicode and CJK characters break nbconvert PDF exportChinese/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 exportsmath in Markdown ($...$) shows as raw text or fails to render when exporting to PDF
- Converting .tex to PDF online: what works in a browser and what doesn'tconvert a .tex file to PDF online, and understand why full LaTeX documents need a real TeX engine
CSV
PDF text extraction
- How to extract text from a PDF (and when you can't)get the text out of a PDF as plain text, and understand why it fails on scanned PDFs
- Why your PDF converted to half-empty text (and how to tell before you convert)a PDF converts to text or markdown with the first half full and the rest blank, because some pages have no text layer and there is no OCR
PDF tables
PDF to Markdown
HTML
- How to convert an HTML file to PDF locally (no upload)convert a local .html file to PDF without uploading it to a web service
- HTML to PDF API: a developer's guide to the optionschoose an approach for generating PDFs from HTML programmatically (self-hosted vs managed API)
- Fix: CSS styles lost when converting HTML to PDFstyling (colors, layout, fonts) disappears or breaks when converting HTML to PDF
Code
- Converting .eml emails to PDF for legal records and archivingturn .eml email files into PDF records for legal review, archiving, and compliance, without losing what matters
- How to save an email as a PDF (Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail)save any email as a PDF file from Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, or a downloaded .eml, with attachments and headers handled correctly
- How to save Outlook emails as PDF (single and in bulk)export Outlook emails to PDF, including batches, and deal with Outlook saving .msg instead of .eml
- How to export Thunderbird emails to PDF (one or hundreds)get emails out of Thunderbird as PDF files, including whole folders, using Thunderbird's native .eml export