MarkdownToPdf — Markdown to PDF toolset

MarkdownToPdf is a Java-based toolkit for converting Markdown to PDF. It consists of two modules:

Module	Artifact	Description
lib	se.alipsa:md2pdf	Core library — turn any Markdown string, file or stream into a PDF byte-array
gui	standalone desktop app	JavaFX editor with live preview, visual style editor and project management

The lib module requires JDK 21 or later. Building the GUI requires JDK 25 or later. The GUI desktop application is shipped as self-contained platform archives that bundle their own Java 25 runtime, so end users do not need a JDK installed. A separate -no-jdk archive is available for users who already have a JavaFX-bundled JDK 25+ and prefer a smaller download.

The library's rendering pipeline is: commonmark-java (Markdown → HTML) → jsoup (HTML → well-formed XHTML) → OpenHTMLtoPDF + Batik (XHTML → PDF).

Quick overview

import se.alipsa.md2pdf.Md2PdfEngine;

byte[] pdf = new Md2PdfEngine()
    .markdown("# Hello\n\nWorld!")
    .css("body { font-family: serif; }")
    .pageMargins("1in")
    .toPdf();

Full API documentation, including styling, images, custom fonts, page headers/footers, and Spring Boot integration lives in lib/README.md.

Installation instructions and usage for the desktop application live in gui/readme.md. If you are building from a source checkout instead, the repository-root ./install.sh builds and installs it in one step (macOS / Linux) — see the gui readme for details.

Linux prerequisites

The bundled runtime supplies Java, but not the system libraries JavaFX draws with. GTK 3 and the WebKit dependencies must be present:

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-0 libxtst6
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install gtk3 libXtst
Arch:          sudo pacman -S gtk3 libxtst

The installer checks for these and reports what is missing, but cannot install them.

Downloads

Download	Install	Size
md2pdf-<version>-linux-x64.zip	unzip, then bash md2pdf-install.sh	~100 MB
md2pdf-<version>-macos-aarch64.zip	unzip, then zsh md2pdf-install.zsh	~100 MB
md2pdf-<version>-windows-x64.zip	unzip, then double-click md2pdf-install.cmd	~100 MB
md2pdf-<version>-no-jdk.zip	unzip, then java --enable-native-access=javafx.graphics,javafx.web,javafx.media -jar MarkdownToPdf.jar (needs a JavaFX-bundled JDK 25+)	~15 MB

GitHub's repo-sidebar "Latest" badge is repo-wide and can point at a lib-only release (which ships no application) when one is newer than the latest gui release. Download the newest release tagged MarkdownToPdf-v* specifically, not whatever the sidebar highlights.

Verify a download against SHA256SUMS from the same release:

Linux:   sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS
macOS:   shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS
Windows: certutil -hashfile <file> SHA256   (compare the line by eye)

Building from source

# Full build: compile, test, spotless format check, SpotBugs
mvn verify

# Build and install to local Maven repo
mvn install

# Build a platform archive (linux | macos | windows | no-jdk)
mvn install -DskipTests && ./gui/createApp.sh linux

# Auto-format all code (Google Java Format)
mvn spotless:apply

License

MIT — see LICENSE.