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Converting Markdown to PDF from VS Code normally means an extension that downloads its own copy of Chromium and often falls over doing it. Paste the Markdown here instead and skip the install entirely.
Producing a PDF needs a browser engine, and a VS Code extension has to obtain one. The popular Markdown PDF extension downloads a private copy of Chromium the first time you run it, which is where most of the reported trouble starts.
Select all in the editor, copy, and paste into this page — or drag the .md file straight from the VS Code explorer onto it. The preview is the real page at the real width with the real margins, so you can correct the layout before producing anything rather than after. Nothing is installed and nothing is configured.
The differences are mostly the things that need a configured engine to work at all.
A web tool is not always the right answer — for a build step, a private document, or an offline machine, a local converter is better. Pandoc is the dependable one, and with a LaTeX engine installed the whole job is a single command:
Most of the popular options — Markdown PDF and Markdown Preview Enhanced among them — convert by launching a headless Chromium of their own, which is the download-on-first-use step described above. That is not a flaw in those extensions; it is the only way for something running inside VS Code to produce a print-accurate PDF, because VS Code has no rendering engine capable of it. Pasting the document into a browser tab sidesteps the problem entirely by using a rendering engine that is already running.
The Chromium download problem gets worse inside Remote-SSH, Codespaces or a devcontainer, where there is often no GUI to run a browser in and egress may be restricted well below what a several-hundred-megabyte download needs. Because this route only needs the document's text to leave the environment rather than a large binary to enter it, it behaves the same from a remote container as from a local machine — which is frequently the actual reason the extension route fails in a team's containerised setup specifically.
Copy the file's contents out of the editor and paste them here, or drag the .md file from the VS Code explorer onto this page, then click Download PDF. Nothing is installed.
It downloads its own copy of Chromium on first use. That download fails on restricted or proxied networks, and the resulting error rarely makes the cause clear.
Yes — pandoc notes.md -o notes.pdf, with pandoc and a TeX distribution installed. It is a large install and Mermaid diagrams need an extra filter, but it works offline and fits into a build.
Only standard and GitHub-flavoured Markdown converts. Syntax that means something to one particular VS Code extension is not recognised here, since nothing in this path runs that extension, so it arrives as literal text rather than the element it was meant to be.
Not directly — this is a web page rather than an extension, so there is no VS Code command to bind. Copying the buffer and pasting it in stays a manual step, though it is usually faster than debugging a broken extension install.
No. The conversion reads no VS Code settings, because VS Code is not part of the process once the text has been copied out. What you paste is treated as GitHub-flavoured Markdown regardless of how the editor was configured to preview it.