Markdown to PDF on a Mac

Most routes from Markdown to PDF go through something else first: a LaTeX install, a browser, or an editor extension. Glance prints the document it already draws, so the PDF is the page you were reading.

The PDF is the page you were reading

Glance draws Markdown itself, with Core Text and Core Graphics, and the PDF comes out of that same renderer. There is no second conversion to HTML and CSS that can drift from what you saw, so everything that renders in the window renders on paper:

• Headings, lists, and tables in real typography
• Fenced code with its syntax colors
• Mermaid diagrams and LaTeX math, display and inline
• Images stored next to the file and images linked from the web

Paper gets a few settings of its own: a fixed 12-point body, three-quarter-inch margins, your Mac's default paper size, and a light page even when you read in dark mode.

Page breaks that respect the document

A naive export slices the document into page-sized strips and cuts straight through whatever sits on the line. Glance breaks between lines of text and between table rows instead, keeps an image, formula, or diagram whole on one page unless it is taller than a page, and never leaves a heading alone at the foot of a page with its paragraph on the next.

⌘P prints through the same path, so a printed copy and a saved PDF match page for page.

The other ways, and what they take

Pandoc is the command-line converter, and for PDF it needs a LaTeX engine such as BasicTeX or an HTML-to-PDF tool installed beside it. It is the right choice for converting folders of files from a script, or for Word and HTML output, which Glance does not do. For one document with a diagram in it, it is a lot of setup.

A browser can print a rendered page to PDF if something has rendered it first, and the result depends on that browser's print engine.

An editor extension, such as Markdown PDF for VS Code, adds export to an editor you may already use, and renders the page in a headless Chromium browser.

Glance needs none of that: open the file, press ⇧⌘E, done. It runs on macOS 14 or later on an Apple Silicon Mac.

Related

Opening Markdown in the first place: how to open .md files on a Mac. Comparing apps that export PDF? See Typora, Marked, and MarkEdit, or the roundup of Mac Markdown apps.