Your browser is the PDF writer
This is the thing to understand first, because everything else follows from it. Text goes into a formatted page, the page opens in a new tab, and your browser's print dialogue appears. Choosing Save as PDF as the destination is what produces the file.
Nothing is uploaded and nothing is downloaded automatically. The PDF is written by the same engine that prints any web page, which is a genuinely capable one — modern browsers produce clean, text-based PDFs with selectable text and embedded fonts.
It also means the print dialogue's settings are not incidental. They decide the paper size, the margins, whether a background prints, and whether the browser stamps its own header and footer on every page. Those defaults are set for printing web pages, not for producing documents, and two of them want changing.
The two settings that matter
Turn off headers and footers. By default most browsers add the page title, the URL, the date and a page number to every sheet. On a document you are sending to someone, a footer reading about:blank is not the impression you were going for. The option is usually under "More settings".
Check the paper size. The dialogue defaults to your system's locale, which is A4 in most of the world and US Letter in North America. A document built for one and printed on the other loses a strip from an edge or shrinks its margins. If the file is going somewhere else, set it deliberately.
Margins and scale are worth a glance too. The default margin is generous, and a document that runs to five pages at default margins often fits four at a narrower setting without looking cramped.
What this is good for
Turning writing you already have into a document you can send. Notes into a handout, a draft into something a client can read on a phone, a block of text into an attachment that will look the same on every machine — which is the entire reason PDF exists.
The [msm_tool slug="text-to-pdf"] takes a title and a body and lays them out with a heading and readable line spacing. Line breaks in what you paste are preserved, so paragraph structure survives, but it is a plain document rather than a typesetting system: there are no styles, no headings within the body, no lists and no images.
That is the right trade for what it is for. When a document needs structure, a word processor is the tool and it will export a PDF of its own.
Write it to be read on a screen
Most PDFs are never printed. They are opened on a laptop or, increasingly, on a phone, and the things that make a document work there are worth doing while the text is still editable.
- Short paragraphs. A wall of text that is fine on paper is punishing in a narrow viewport.
- Blank lines between sections. Without styling available, white space is the only structural signal you have, so use it deliberately.
- Spell out links. Pasted text produces plain text, not clickable links, so write the address in full rather than "click here".
- Give it a real title. It becomes the heading on page one, and browsers frequently use it as the suggested filename.
What it will not carry
Formatting from wherever you copied the text. Paste from a word processor and you get the words, not the bold, the italics, the bullet characters as bullets, or the tables as tables. A table pasted in becomes lines of text with the columns run together, which is worse than useless.
It also has no page control. Where a page breaks is decided by the browser at print time, so a heading can land at the foot of a page with its section overleaf. On a short document this rarely matters; on a long one it is the reason to use a word processor instead.
Check before sending
Use the preview panel in the print dialogue, which shows exactly what the file will contain. Look at the page count, look at whether headers and footers are still switched on, and look at the last page — a single orphaned line on a page of its own is easily fixed by tightening the text and worth fixing before it goes out.
Then open the saved file. The print preview and the finished PDF are almost always identical, and the almost is why the file you send should be one you have looked at.