Convert HTML to PDF
Free online converter for HTML files. Fixed-layout format for sharing and printing. Nothing to install, no watermark, and every file is deleted automatically.
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Upload a HTML file to convert it to PDF. Up to 3 files at once, 100 MB each.
Free · up to 3 files · 100 MB each · files deleted automatically after 1 hour.
About HTML and PDF
HTML .html
The markup language of the web: text wrapped in tags that describe structure, which a browser then renders.
Good for
- Opens in any browser on any device
- Structural and accessible when written properly
- Styleable, linkable and searchable
Trade-offs
- Appearance depends on the renderer and its stylesheet
- Images and styles usually live outside the file
- No fixed pagination — awkward to print predictably
text/html
PDF .pdf
A fixed-layout page format. A PDF describes exactly where every glyph and line sits, so it looks identical everywhere — which is precisely what makes it awkward to edit.
Good for
- Identical layout on every device, screen and printer
- Embeds its own fonts, so nothing reflows or substitutes
- The accepted format for contracts, invoices and forms
Trade-offs
- Not built for editing — text is positioned, not flowing
- A scanned PDF is just images until text recognition is run
- Reflows badly on small screens
application/pdf
HTML and PDF side by side
| HTML | ||
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Plain text markup | Mixed — per object |
| Transparency | n/a | Yes |
| Animation | Yes — via CSS | No |
| Typically used for | Web pages, email templates, exported reports | Contracts, invoices, forms, anything printed |
What changes when you convert HTML to PDF
A page that reflows becomes one that does not
HTML describes a document that adapts to whatever window it is opened in; PDF describes fixed pages of a fixed width. The converter has to choose a page size and commit the layout to it, so anything that depended on the width of the viewport is resolved to a single answer. Styling is approximated as closely as the target allows, and scripts are not run — whatever a page would have generated after loading is simply not in the file.
Remote images are not downloaded
Images referenced by URL rather than embedded in the file are not fetched during conversion. That is a deliberate boundary: a converter that loaded remote resources would be making requests on your behalf, from our servers, to addresses inside a file we did not write. Anything linked externally will be missing from the result.
Rendered by LibreOffice
The conversion runs through headless LibreOffice — the same engine behind the desktop suite. Fonts are the thing to watch: the document is typeset with what the server has available, and a substituted typeface rarely occupies exactly the same width as the one it replaces, so line breaks can fall differently than they would on your machine.
Read as UTF-8
A HTML is a text file, and a text file does not record which encoding it uses — that is the one thing the format cannot tell you about itself. We read it as UTF-8, which is right for essentially anything produced this decade. A file saved long ago in a regional encoding can arrive with accented characters mangled, and the fix is to re-save it as UTF-8 before converting rather than after. Tabs and spaces used to line columns up will also shift once the text is set in a proportional typeface.
Other HTML conversions
Other ways to get PDF
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