radekhulan/md2pdf

MD2PDF is a PHP command-line tool that converts Markdown text files into professionally formatted PDF documents. The documentation is primarily in Czech, but the tool itself works with any Markdown content. The idea is that you install the engine once in a shared location and then point it at different projects through a per-project configuration file, so the core code stays unchanged across all your documents. The tool includes its own Markdown parser rather than relying on an external library. It handles the common formatting elements: headings, nested lists with checkboxes, GitHub-style tables with alignment and line wrapping, blockquotes styled as callout boxes, code blocks, images, footnotes, internal anchor links, and inline formatting like bold, italic, strikethrough, and inline code. A special convention lets you put metadata in the opening blockquote of a document, pulling out the version number, date, author, and purpose to display on a title page alongside a logo. There are two rendering backends. The default uses mPDF, a pure PHP library, which requires only PHP and Composer to install and run. The second backend drives a headless Chrome browser with GhostScript, which produces vector-quality Mermaid diagram output. Mermaid is a text-based diagram language that describes flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and other charts as code inside a fenced block in the Markdown file. Both backends produce the same overall page layout: a title page without headers or footers, followed by body pages with running headers, footers, and page numbers, and an automatic table of contents generated from second-level headings. Wide code blocks and tables are automatically shrunk to fit the page width. Long strings such as URLs or encoded data are broken at word boundaries so they do not overflow the margins. Three font families are embedded directly in the output (Source Sans 3, Cascadia Mono, and DejaVu as a fallback), so the PDF looks consistent regardless of which fonts are installed on the viewer's machine. A combine mode merges multiple Markdown files into a single PDF with one title page, one continuous table of contents, and internal cross-file links converted to clickable anchors. File order is taken from an INDEX.md file in the source directory.