MD tool

Preview, edit and export Markdown to PDF and RTF, without leaving VS Code.

Leia em português

Features

• Live preview in place of the editor or next to it (Ctrl+K Alt+V), with synchronized scrolling: the book and side-panel buttons in the editor title.
• GitHub-flavored Markdown: tables, clickable task lists, footnotes, front matter.
• Syntax highlighting, KaTeX math and Mermaid diagrams.
• Follows the VS Code theme, or always light or dark; your own CSS on top.
• Export to PDF and RTF (for Word and LibreOffice) with nothing else to install: no browser, no Pandoc, no LaTeX.
• PDFs with real text, links, bookmarks and vector formulas and diagrams.
• A simple PDF and RTF viewer to check the result without leaving VS Code.
• An ABNT profile for formal documents in Portuguese: numbered sections, footnotes at the foot of the page, captioned figures and tables, page numbers.
• Editing helpers: bold, italic, strikethrough and code toggles (multi-cursor), links, table formatting, table of contents and list continuation on Enter.

Export

Run Export to PDF or Export to RTF from the editor's context menu, the Explorer, the preview's toolbar or the Command Palette. The file is written next to the Markdown file (see mdTool.export.outputDir), and a notification lets you preview it, open it in its default app or show it in its folder.

The same document, exported:

Both formats are written by the extension itself, with your system fonts (embedded in the PDF):

• PDF: selectable text, clickable links (also to headings and footnotes), a bookmark per heading, page numbers, and formulas, diagrams and SVG images as vectors.
• RTF: headings with outline levels, lists, tables, code and footnotes; formulas, diagrams and SVG/GIF/WebP images are embedded as PNG pictures.

Formulas are typeset with MathJax. Mermaid diagrams are drawn by VS Code itself in a panel that opens beside the editor for a moment during the export. An invalid formula or diagram is exported as its source text, with a warning.

Checking the result

Preview in the export notification opens the file in a simple viewer beside the editor. It reloads when you export again, so it can stay open while you work on the document. To open any .pdf or .rtf file in it, use Open in PDF / RTF Viewer in the Explorer's context menu or Reopen Editor With….

• PDF: pages drawn by pdf.js, with selectable text, working links and zoom.
• RTF: read by the extension itself: text formatting, headings, lists, tables, links, footnotes and PNG/JPEG pictures. It shows the content, but Word and LibreOffice may lay it out slightly differently. Other picture formats (EMF, WMF) appear as [image].

Per-document options

Front matter can override the PDF settings:

---
title: Quarterly report
pdf:
  format: Letter
  landscape: true
  margin: 15mm 20mm
  header: '{title}'
  footer: 'Page {page} of {pages}'
---

ABNT profile

For formal documents following the Brazilian ABNT rules (NBR 14724, NBR 6024, NBR 10520), set mdTool.export.profile to abnt, or choose it per document:

---
perfil: abnt
subtitulo: Relatório anual
autor: Secretaria Municipal de Saúde
local: Sobral
data: '2026'
---

Both PDF and RTF then use A4 with 3/2 cm margins, Times New Roman 12 pt, justified 1.5-spaced text with a 1.25 cm first-line indent, black text and page numbers in the top right corner.

Gráfico: …, Mapa: … and other illustration names work like Figura, each numbered on its own. The export warns when a figure or table has no source or a heading skips a level. An abnt: block in the front matter adjusts the details:

abnt:
  lista_nao_ordenada: marcador # bullets instead of a), b)
  hr: linha # ignorar | linha | quebra_pagina
  tabela_padrao: tabela # tables without a caption: IBGE style instead of quadro
  primeira_pagina_visivel: false # no number on the first page
  secao_primaria_nova_pagina: true # every ## starts a page
  numeracao_secoes: false

The full rules are in docs/spec-perfil-abnt-documento-formal.md.

Editing

On macOS, use Cmd instead of Ctrl. The shortcuts only apply to Markdown files, and every command is in the Markdown (MD tool) submenu of the editor's context menu.

Outline, folding, path completion and pasting or dropping images already come with VS Code's built-in Markdown support, so MD tool leaves them alone. To save pasted images in an assets/ folder next to the document:

"markdown.copyFiles.destination": { "**/*.md": "${documentDirName}/assets/${fileName}" }

Settings

Security and privacy

• The preview runs with a strict Content Security Policy, and any HTML is sanitized.
• In untrusted workspaces, raw HTML and custom stylesheets are disabled.
• MD tool collects no telemetry. The only network requests are for remote images a document uses, in the preview and when exporting.
• Exporting runs no external program.

Known limitations

• Inline formulas in RTF are lowered to the baseline with the RTF \dn command, which LibreOffice ignores: there, formulas with subscripts or fractions sit slightly above the line.
• The PDF follows a GitHub-like layout of its own: custom preview stylesheets do not apply to it.
• Emoji are drawn in a single color (PDF fonts cannot carry color glyphs).
• Raw HTML is left out of PDF and RTF, with a warning.
• ABNT profile: the PDF does not hyphenate (the RTF lets Word do it), tables split across pages repeat their header but are not marked "continua"/"continuação", and there is no table of contents page yet. LibreOffice draws the footnote rule with its own settings.

Requirements

VS Code 1.90 or later. Nothing else.

License

MIT. Third-party licenses are in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt inside the package.