rayomd

RayoMD converts Markdown to PDF with its own C++17 parser and layout engine and writes the PDF bytes itself: no browser, TeX installation, Pandoc or runtime to install. The Linux download is 727 KB (852 KB for Windows) and the binary needs only libc; the static build needs nothing at all.

Under a millisecond. A note with a formula, a Mermaid flowchart and highlighted code goes from Markdown to PDF in 0.66 ms, start to exit, as a fresh process of the static Linux build with 3.5 MiB of peak memory (hyperfine, 2,000 runs; the screenshot). A running process (--serve, --batch) exports each further document in 0.16 ms, and one batch writes eight documents with 100 pages in 5 ms.

The longer tester.md (Unicode text, tables, code, footnotes, formulas) takes 1.34 ms, where Pandoc + Typst took 357 ms, md-to-pdf (Chromium) 1,821 ms and Pandoc + XeLaTeX 2,147 ms: RayoMD 5.2.5 on an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650GE, 2026-10-20, comparing time to a finished PDF, not identical output.

• GitHub Markdown: tables, task lists, footnotes, alerts, and bookmarks and #anchor links from headings
• TeX math typeset natively in embedded fonts; code coloured as on GitHub in 29 languages
• Mermaid flowcharts, sequence diagrams and pie charts drawn as vectors; PNG, JPEG and SVG images
• Tables of contents, numbered headings, page numbers, page sizes, and themes with fonts, colours, headers, footers and a cover
• Books from an mdBook or GitBook SUMMARY.md or a folder; Obsidian vaults with callouts, wiki links and embedded notes
• Whole folders on up to 64 threads with a JSON Lines report, --stdin, and a warm --serve mode
• PDF/A-3b archives and tagged PDF/UA-1, validated with veraPDF; optional reversible PDFs that carry the exact Markdown source

It renders a Markdown subset, not everything Pandoc does: no HTML/CSS layout or LaTeX packages, and unsupported input degrades to readable text instead of failing the export. A desktop app, RayoMD GUI, shows the real PDF as you type.