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
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