What it does

MD View turns markdown to PDF with bookmarks on Windows in one keystroke. Press Ctrl+Shift+E (or pick File → Export as PDF…) and the app writes a fully formatted PDF — every heading becomes an entry in the PDF’s bookmark tree. The bookmarks are nested: an H1 becomes a top-level entry, an H2 becomes a child of the most recent H1, an H3 becomes a child of that H2, and so on. Click any bookmark in Acrobat, Edge, Foxit, Preview, or any modern PDF viewer and you jump straight to that section. Code blocks keep their syntax highlighting. KaTeX math renders identically to the reader. Page breaks respect headings and code blocks — long blocks don’t get split mid-line.

This isn’t Ctrl+P → Save as PDF — that path produces a flat document with no outline, and every PDF viewer just shows you a long scroll. MD View runs its own exporter so the outline survives.

Why it exists

If you’ve ever shared a markdown spec with a stakeholder who doesn’t read markdown, you know the friction: you can copy-paste it into Google Docs (loses formatting), screenshot it (loses everything), or hit Print → PDF (loses the outline). For documents over a few pages, losing the outline is the worst trade — your reader can’t navigate, can’t link to a section, can’t open it months later and find the one part they remember. MD View ships exports that work the way PDFs were meant to work.

How to use it

The shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+E. The menu path is File → Export as PDF…. Both open the standard Windows save dialog with the current document’s name pre-filled.

Under the hood

PDF export is the only feature in MD View that creates a second WebView at runtime. When you trigger it, the app opens a hidden WebView2 window, loads the document into it, then drives the WebView via Chromium DevTools Protocol — specifically Page.printToPDF with the bookmark-emitting flag enabled. The hidden window runs with its own capability file (mdview-pdf-export.json), isolated from the main reader’s window context. When the PDF buffer comes back, MD View writes it through Tauri’s native file API and the hidden window closes. A typical export takes a few seconds — long enough that there’s a transient notice, short enough that it never feels like a hang.

Use cases

• Sharing specs with non-engineering stakeholders — designers, product managers, legal review. PDFs work everywhere; markdown viewers don’t.
• Archiving documents — a Pro spec from 2026 should still be readable in 2032. PDF is the closest thing to a permanent format.
• Long-form reading on devices that don’t read markdown — Kindle, Remarkable, paper.
• Submitting design docs for legal or compliance review — reviewers expect PDFs with navigable outlines; markdown round-trips lose them.