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Other tools

Plate|Fold picks a page size per figure. The tools below offer other export controls and workflows, and custom CSS or plugins can change their behavior. If your documents don't have figures wider than a text column, or you don't need a PDF, one of them may suit you better.

The linked project documentation describes the following. This comparison covers documented export controls, not every possible customization.

Obsidian's PDF export

Use it when your notes already live in Obsidian and one page size for the whole note is fine.

Obsidian includes PDF export for notes. If you're already using it, try the built-in export on a representative note before adopting another tool. Plugins and print CSS can change its behavior, so check their export support separately.

Plate|Fold is the better fit when a note mixes normal prose with diagrams too wide for the page, when you're exporting a folder of notes in one go, or when a script needs to run the export. Plate|Fold keeps soft line breaks by default, as Obsidian does, but it doesn't understand Obsidian's own syntax: wikilinks and embeds stay as literal text, and callouts render as ordinary blockquotes.

Typora

Use it when you want to write and export in the same window, with a theme you can see as you type.

Typora is a commercial Markdown editor with Mermaid support and a PDF export that sets paper size, margins, headers and footers with page numbers, and a theme. Export settings are global. A document's front matter can override them when the corresponding export preference is enabled.

Plate|Fold is the better fit when diagrams need bigger pages than the body text, or when exports need to run unattended from a command line or CI.

md-to-pdf

Use it when you're in a Node.js toolchain and want Markdown to PDF with CSS you control.

md-to-pdf is an MIT-licensed Node.js command that prints through Puppeteer and headless Chromium. It takes a stylesheet, front matter and pdf_options for page format and margins, which apply to the whole document. Its documentation doesn't describe built-in Mermaid rendering.

Plate|Fold is the better fit when Mermaid diagrams should render without extra setup, and when wide ones need their own pages. Plate|Fold doesn't need Node.js.

md2pdf-mermaid

Use it when you want a small pip install that turns Markdown with Mermaid and emoji into a PDF, and a single page size is enough.

md2pdf-mermaid is an MIT-licensed Python package, version 1.4.3 as of December 2025. It renders Mermaid diagrams to PNG images through Playwright's Chromium, and takes --page-size (A4, A3 or Letter) and --orientation flags that apply to the whole document. It installs from PyPI.

Plate|Fold is the better fit when diagrams should stay vector in the PDF, and when one document needs portrait text pages and landscape or oversized figure pages together.

Pandoc

Use it when you need output formats other than PDF, citations, or a LaTeX typesetting pipeline.

Plate|Fold only produces PDF, prints through a browser rather than LaTeX, and has no bibliography support.

When not to use Plate|Fold