Markdown to PDF & Word

Your AI writes Markdown. Your boss wants a Word doc. One click — cleaned, branded, done.

A Visual Studio Code extension that turns Markdown into clean, professional documents — PDF, Word (.docx), or HTML — with a visual customization studio, reusable document profiles, an AI tone-polish engine, and a rule-based cleanup system that strips AI clutter. No Pandoc. No CSS. No setup.

Table of Contents

• About
• Why This Extension
• Features
• AI Tone Polish
• Installation
• Usage
• Commands
• Settings
• How It Works
• Document Profiles
• Build From Source
• Contributing
• Roadmap
• Star History
• License
• Acknowledgments

📖 About

Markdown is great for developers and AI tools, but raw .md files — full of #, *, backticks, emoji, and chatty AI phrases like "Certainly! Here's your document…" — are not something you can hand to HR, a client, or any non-technical reader.

Markdown to PDF & Word solves this entirely inside VS Code. It cleans the Markdown, applies a professional layout (cover page, branding, headers/footers, table of contents), optionally polishes the tone with your preferred AI provider, and exports a polished PDF, Word, or HTML document you can send to anyone — all in one click, with nothing else to install (no Pandoc, no external tools).

It is designed for developers who dislike reading raw Markdown and who frequently need to share AI- or hand-written Markdown as a real, presentable document.

🎯 Why This Extension

Most existing tools do one piece of this. None combine them:

✨ Features

🧹 Cleanup Engine (Offline, No AI)

Rule-based removal of AI conversational filler — "Certainly! Here's…", "Let me know if…" — emoji, inconsistent heading spacing, smart quotes/dashes, and excessive blank lines. 100% offline and deterministic. Toggle each rule on/off in the studio.

🎨 Customization Studio

A visual panel — no CSS required — to set a cover page, brand colors, fonts, header/footer, page numbers, and layout. Includes a page-accurate live preview (real A4/Letter/Legal sheet, portrait/landscape, margins, header/footer bands), zoom controls (in/out/fit-to-width), a draggable splitter, and a fullscreen mode.

📁 Document Profiles

Save your look as a reusable profile in .markready/profiles/*.json and commit it so your whole team exports the same way. Ships with presets: HR Formal, Client Proposal, Internal Report, Minimal — plus in-studio New / Duplicate / Delete / Reset / Import / Export.

🤖 AI Tone Polish

Optionally polish your markdown through OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, or OpenRouter before export. See the AI section for details.

📄 Rich Markdown Rendering

• Syntax highlighting for fenced code blocks (selectable theme)
• Task lists, footnotes, tables, blockquotes, horizontal rules
• KaTeX math ($...$ / $$...$$), opt-in per profile
• YAML front matter — title/author/date feed the cover and {{placeholder}} tokens
• Table of Contents with depth control and optional heading numbering
• Optional watermark on every page

📂 Folder Gather + Reorder

Gather every .md file in a folder, include/exclude and reorder them, then combine into one document.

📦 Three Export Formats

• PDF — via your installed Chrome/Edge/Chromium (auto-detected)
• Word (.docx) — no Pandoc, no external tools
• HTML — standalone, self-contained

All exports embed relative images automatically.

🧼 Clean UI

Built with official VS Code Codicons — no emoji anywhere in the product UI.

🤖 AI Tone Polish

Bring your own API key. No subscription, no lock-in, no usage tracking.

The AI tone polish feature lets you run your markdown through a large language model before export — cleaning up phrasing, removing awkward sentences, and making the language professional, clear, and confident — all while preserving structure, code blocks, and data.

How It Works

Original Markdown  →  [Your chosen LLM]  →  Diff Review  →  Apply / Discard
                            ↑
                    Your API Key (never stored in files)

1. Enable AI polish in the studio and select a provider
2. Configure your API key (stored securely in VS Code's secret storage)
3. Click Polish Now — the diff is shown inline
4. Review changes: Apply to accept or Discard to reject
5. During export with AI enabled, polish is applied seamlessly

Supported Providers

Configuration

Commands

Security

• API keys are stored in VS Code's secret storage — never in profiles, settings, logs, or files
• Each key is stored under a provider-specific secret identifier
• Supports distinct keys per provider (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, OpenRouter)
• Keys can be tested, individually reconfigured, or bulk-cleared

Default System Prompt

The polish is guided by a carefully crafted system prompt that instructs the AI to:

• Preserve all headings, code blocks, lists, tables, and formatting exactly as-is
• Make language professional, clear, and confident
• Remove casual or conversational phrasing
• Never add, remove, or alter data, numbers, names, or specifications
• Output only the polished markdown — no greeting, sign-off, or explanation

You can edit the prompt freely in the studio and reset to default at any time.

📥 Installation

From VS Code Marketplace (recommended)

1. Open Visual Studio Code
2. Go to the Extensions view (Ctrl+Shift+X)
3. Search for Markdown to PDF & Word
4. Click Install

Or install from the command line:

code --install-extension AnandSundaramoorthySa.markdown-to-pdf-word

From a .vsix file

Download the .vsix from the Releases page, then:

code --install-extension markdown-to-pdf-word-1.3.1.vsix

PDF requirement: PDF export renders through an installed Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Chromium (auto-detected on Windows/macOS/Linux). Most machines already have one. If yours doesn't, install Chrome/Edge or point markready.chromePath at a browser executable (or set the CHROME_PATH environment variable). Word (.docx) and HTML export need no browser at all.

🚀 Usage

1. Open any Markdown (.md) file
2. Press Ctrl+Shift+P and run Markdown to PDF & Word: Open Customization Studio
3. Adjust the cover page, colors, fonts, layout, and AI options — watch the live preview update
4. Click Export PDF, Export Word, or Export HTML

You can also right-click a .md file (or a folder) in the Explorer for quick actions.

⌨️ Commands

Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P):

⚙️ Settings

🔧 How It Works

.md  →  front matter + cleanup (rules, no AI)  →  markdown-it (+highlight/math/GFM)
     →  AI polish (optional, BYO key)  →  HTML + cover + TOC + CSS
     →  PDF (Chrome/Edge) | DOCX (no Pandoc) | HTML
                           ↑
               Document Profile (JSON)

The Customization Studio edits the Profile JSON and renders the preview through the same pipeline used for export, so what you see is what you get.

📁 Document Profiles

A profile is a small JSON file describing the cover page, branding, header/footer, layout, options, and AI polish configuration. Saving a profile writes it to:

<your-project>/.markready/profiles/<profile-name>.json

Commit this file to your repository and everyone on the team exports documents with the same look. Built-in presets are available out of the box and can be cloned and customized.

🔨 Build From Source

# 1. Clone
git clone https://github.com/anandsundaramoorthysa/markdown-to-pdf-word.git
cd markdown-to-pdf-word

# 2. Install dependencies (no browser download — PDF uses your installed Chrome/Edge)
npm install

# 3. Compile
npm run compile

# 4. Run the unit tests
npm test

# 5. Launch the Extension Development Host
#    Press F5 in VS Code

To package a .vsix:

npm install -g @vscode/vsce
vsce package

See CONTRIBUTING.md for detailed development setup and contribution guidelines.

👥 Contributing

Contributions are welcome — bug fixes, new presets, features, or docs.

• Discuss first: for anything non-trivial, open an issue before coding
• Understand the codebase: the pipeline is cleanup.ts → render.ts → ai/ → exporters/*, with the UI in panel.ts (studio) and gatherPanel.ts (folder gather)
• Keep the cleanup safe: the cleanup engine must never delete real content — add tests when adding rules
• Match the style: TypeScript, no emoji in code or UI (use Codicons)

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full contribution workflow, code style guide, and development setup.

🗺 Roadmap

• Code-block theme options
• Page watermark
• Math (KaTeX) and richer markdown (task lists, footnotes, front matter)
• AI tone-polish (optional, bring-your-own-key)
• Mermaid diagrams (kept off for now to preserve the fully-offline, small-bundle promise)
• Logo positioning in header/footer
• Publish to Open VSX (for Cursor / VSCodium / Windsurf)
• More built-in profile presets

See PLAN.md for the full design and roadmap.

⭐ Star History

📄 License

This project is released under the MIT License. You are free to use, modify, and distribute it under the terms of this license. See the LICENSE file for the full text.

🙏 Acknowledgments

Built with these excellent open-source projects:

• markdown-it — Markdown parsing and rendering
• puppeteer-core — HTML to PDF via your installed browser
• html-to-docx — HTML to Word, no Pandoc
• highlight.js — code syntax highlighting
• KaTeX — fast math typesetting
• diff — text diff engine for AI polish review
• gray-matter — YAML front-matter parsing
• VS Code Codicons — the icon set used in the UI

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