CSV to PDF, a table you can print.

To convert a CSV to PDF is to draw the rows and columns of a comma-separated file as a table on pages. This tool does it in your browser. It repeats the header row on every page, gives each column the width it needs, and saves a PDF with real text, so you can select, copy and search it. The cells are printed exactly as they are in the file: no number is rounded, no date is reformatted, and a code such as 007 keeps its zeros.

How to use it

1. Drop a CSV file on the box, or click it to choose one. You can also press Paste CSV text, or Try an example to see how it looks.
2. Look at the preview. Use the arrows or the page box above it to move through the pages.
3. Choose the Page size and Direction. Auto turns the page to landscape when the table is wider than a portrait page.
4. Change the Text size and Margins if the table is too small or too crowded.
5. Under Table, turn the header row, the shading, the lines and the page numbers on or off.
6. Press Download PDF. The preview you see is a page of that file.

What it reads

Commas, semicolons, tabs and pipes are all found by looking at the first rows, and the box named Cells split by shows which one was used. Change it if the guess is wrong. A cell in double quotes can hold the delimiter, a line break or a doubled quote (""). A file that starts with a byte order mark is read correctly. Files saved by older programs in Windows-1252, Latin-1 or another character set can be read by choosing it under Characters. If the file has rows with fewer cells than the widest row, the empty cells are left blank and the page says so.

Wide tables

The default setting, Fit to the page width, works in steps. First the text may shrink to as little as 80% of the size you picked, never below 5 pt, so every row stays on one line. If that is not enough, long cells wrap onto more lines inside their column, but a word is only cut when it is longer than about 14 characters. If even the narrowest columns do not fit, the text shrinks further, down to 5 pt. Past that, the extra columns continue on more pages, with the first column repeated so each row can still be recognised. A small line at the top of those pages says which columns are shown.

The other choice, Keep size, add column pages, never shrinks the text. It wraps long cells, and when the columns still do not fit it puts the rest on more pages the same way.

Worked examples

How many rows fit on a page. At 9 pt a one-line row is 9 × 1.3 = 11.7 pt of text plus 2 × 2.88 pt of padding, 17.46 pt in all. An A4 landscape page is 595.28 pt tall. With Normal margins (36 pt) and page numbers on, 595.28 − 36 − 50 = 509.28 pt is left for the table, and 17.46 pt of that is the header. The remaining 491.82 pt holds 28 rows (28 × 17.46 = 488.9 pt). A file with 28 data rows is one page, and 29 rows is two.

A long file. A file with 20,000 one-line data rows at these settings becomes 20,000 ÷ 28 = 714.3, so 715 pages, each with the header on top. The preview shows one page at a time, so it stays quick, and Download PDF writes the pages a few at a time and shows its progress.

Numbers lined up. A column where nine in ten cells look like numbers, such as 1,249.50 or 18 400.00 or 89,90, is lined up on its right edge. Only the position changes. The text of each cell is the same as in the file.

Common problems

• Question marks in the table. The PDF font covers Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese letters. Other scripts, such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic or emoji, are drawn as a question mark, and the page counts them for you.
• Everything is in one column. The delimiter was not found, often because the file has only one column, or the first rows are text. Pick it by hand under Cells split by.
• Strange letters such as é. The file is not UTF-8. Pick the character set it was saved in under Characters.
• An Excel file. Save it as CSV first, or use Excel to CSV. This page reads text files only.
• A cell is cut off with three dots. It was longer than a whole page. Cells are shortened only in that case.

To go the other way, use CSV to Excel or CSV to JSON. For plain text that is not a table, Text to PDF keeps every line as typed.