mrkdwn-pdf-cli

Lightweight Markdown to PDF converter. No headless browser, no Puppeteer, no Chrome — just pure JavaScript.

Renders GitHub-style PDFs with syntax-highlighted code blocks, tables, images, and clean typography.

Install

npm install -g mrkdwn-pdf-cli

Or use directly with npx:

npx mrkdwn-pdf-cli README.md

Usage

# Basic — outputs README.pdf alongside the input file
mdpdf README.md

# Custom output path
mdpdf README.md -o docs/readme.pdf

# Letter size with wider margins
mdpdf README.md --page-size Letter --margin 60

# Set PDF title metadata
mdpdf README.md --title "Project Documentation"

Options

| Option | Short | Default | Description | |--------|-------|---------|-------------| | --output <path> | -o | <input>.pdf | Output file path | | --title <title> | -t | filename | PDF document title | | --page-size <size> | -s | A4 | Page size (A4, Letter, Legal, etc.) | | --margin <points> | -m | 40 | Page margins in points |

Supported Markdown Features

• Headings (h1–h6)
• Bold, italic, ~~strikethrough~~
• Links
• Ordered and unordered lists (with nesting)
• Tables
• Code blocks with syntax highlighting (190+ languages)
• Inline code
• Blockquotes
• Images (local files embedded as base64, remote URLs)
• Horizontal rules

Programmatic API

import { convert } from "mrkdwn-pdf-cli";

const outputPath = await convert({
  input: "README.md",
  output: "readme.pdf",
  title: "My Project",
  pageSize: "A4",
  margin: 40,
});

How It Works

1. Parse — Markdown is parsed with markdown-it (CommonMark + GFM extensions)
2. Highlight — Code blocks are syntax-highlighted with highlight.js
3. Convert — HTML is transformed to a document layout via html-to-pdfmake
4. Render — PDF is generated with pdfmake using built-in Helvetica and Courier fonts

No browser engine involved at any step.

License

MIT