Tablizer

Convert Plain Text to PDF Online

Paste a Plain Text table below, edit it if you need to, and get PDF back. The conversion runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded, there is no size limit and there is no signup.

From

The only part of this site that uses a server. The address is sent to it so the page can be fetched, because a browser is not allowed to fetch someone else's page itself. Your own files are never involved.

Nothing here is uploaded. The parsing happens on this page.
Edit
Paste or upload something above and it will appear here.
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The output will appear here once there is a table to convert.

What Plain Text is

Plain text here means columns lined up with spaces, the way a command line tool prints a table.

Terminal output, log files, fixed-width exports from older systems.

What PDF is

PDF describes a page: glyphs at coordinates, not rows and columns. A table in a PDF is a visual arrangement, not a data structure.

Reports, invoices, statements and anything sent to be read rather than processed.

What changes when you convert Plain Text to PDF

Two shapes are handled. If the same character positions are blank on every line, those gutters are treated as column boundaries, so values containing single spaces stay intact. Otherwise the lines are split on runs of whitespace.

The table is drawn into a paginated document with the header repeated on every page, so a long table stays readable past page one. Page size, orientation and font size are all adjustable.

What carries over from Plain Text to PDF

plain text records 2 things about a table that PDF has no way to hold.

Nothing in PDF records that the first row is a header. It is drawn at the top and looks like one, which is all that is left of the distinction.

PDF is the end of the line for this data. Reading the table back out of it is a separate and much harder problem than writing it, so keep the plain text if you will need the values again.

Questions

How do I convert Plain Text to PDF?

Paste your Plain Text into the box above or drop the file onto it. Check the table in the grid, then copy or download the PDF from the output panel. It takes one step and the data never leaves your browser.

Can I get my table back out of the PDF?

Out of one made here, yes, because the text is real text. Out of a scanned document, no. A scan is an image of a page, and pulling data from it needs optical character recognition, which is a different job with a different failure rate.

Can I convert the PDF back to plain text afterwards?

Not mechanically. PDF keeps how the table looks, not what it held, so going back means reading the values off the page again. Keep the plain text if you will need it.

Is there a limit on file size?

No. The work happens on your own machine, so the limit is your machine's memory rather than an upload cap. A file with tens of thousands of rows converts in a second or two.

Is my data uploaded anywhere?

No. The parsing and generating are done by JavaScript running on this page. You can watch the network tab while you convert and see that nothing is sent.

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