Paste to PDF — the fastest way to archive plain text

The most requested tool on nctools is not OCR, not conversion, not signing — it is Paste to PDF. Paste a block of text, click a button, get a PDF. It sounds trivial. It is not.

Why it matters

A support agent needs to attach a chat transcript to a Zendesk ticket. A lawyer needs to file an email thread as evidence. A journalist needs to freeze a Twitter thread before it is deleted. In each case the source is plain text — copyable, ephemeral, format-fragile. The archival target is a PDF — indexed, tamper-evident, universally openable.

The gap between those two states is where Paste to PDF lives. It is a 30-second workflow that used to require Microsoft Word, a print dialog, and a screenshot tool.

What good looks like

A well-designed paste-to-PDF tool solves four problems the user did not know they had:

1. Typography — plain text pasted into a Word doc looks like homework. We apply a readable serif for body and a display sans for optional headings, both licensed for embedding.
2. Line breaks — a copied email has hard wraps at 76 characters. A PDF page is wider. We collapse those to soft wraps unless the user opts out.
3. Metadata — a timestamp, source URL, and page numbering go in the footer automatically so the PDF is provenance-tagged.
4. Fidelity — Markdown formatting (bold, italic, headings, lists, code blocks) is preserved if we detect it.

Try it

Head to /tools/paste-to-pdf, drop 5000 words of text, and download a laid-out PDF in under a second.