The full tour

Everything Vaelora does.

A walk through the whole app, from first keystroke to finished PDF.

The editor

Write on the left. Watch pages on the right.

One window, three panes: Markdown source with line numbers and syntax tinting, a live paginated preview, and the conversion inspector. Or go full Source or full Preview — one click in the toolbar.

Vaelora's split view: Markdown source beside a live paginated preview, with the conversion inspector on the right
Markdown, all of it

Your syntax already works.

CommonMark and GitHub-flavored Markdown, rendered by Apple's own engine — exactly the dialect you already write.

  • Tables, task lists, footnotes — with strikethrough, autolinks, and smart typography.
  • GitHub alerts — [!NOTE], [!TIP], [!IMPORTANT], [!WARNING] become tinted callouts.
  • Emoji shortcodes — :seedling: → 🌱, plus <mark>, sub~script~ and super^script^.
  • Fenced divs — ::: aside blocks give your CSS real styling hooks.
Trail guide document showing tips, warnings, task lists and tables rendered from Markdown
Front matter

Metadata in. Title page out.

Open your file with a YAML block and Vaelora sets a proper title block — title, subtitle, author, date. Add your own fields, like version: or status:, and they print as labelled rows. Every field doubles as a {token} for headers and footers.

YAML front matter in the source pane beside the typeset title block it produces
Preview showing a clean page break: the page ends with a footer page number, and footnotes settle on the final page
Pagination

Page breaks with judgment.

The preview shows real pages because Vaelora computes real pages — the same ones your PDF gets.

  • Headings stay with their text — nothing strands at the bottom of a page.
  • Widow & orphan control — paragraphs split at line boundaries, never mid-thought.
  • Your CSS gets a vote — break-before, break-after, and break-avoid are honored, so a style can force chapters onto fresh pages.
  • Fast at any size — pagination is virtualized, so hundred-page documents stay smooth.
The inspector's Page tab: page setup, header and footer slots with tokens, and page numbering controls
Headers, footers & numbering

Page furniture, minus the fuss.

Three slots each for header and footer, filled with tokens — {page}, {total}, {title}, {date}, and any front-matter field you've written, like {version} or {status}.

  • Styled by the same CSS as the document, so they always match.
  • Numbering that understands documents — start on the first page, after the title page, after the contents, or any page you choose.
  • Arabic or Roman numeral formats, with a custom first number.
  • Margins in your units — cm or inches, following your system setting.
Styles

One document, any look.

Eleven built-in styles, and every one of them is plain CSS you can read. Duplicate one, edit it live in the Style Editor against a specimen or your own document, and share it as a portable .mdpdfstyle file.

The Field Notes document in the Default style
Default
The same document in the Compact style, fitting more per page
Compact
The same document in the serif Manuscript style with centered headings
Manuscript
The Technical Report style generates a dedicated cover page
Technical Report

Plus Academic Paper, Agreement, Editorial, Journal Article, Letter, Resume, and Thesis — see how styles work.

The Style Editor: commented CSS on the left, a live preview against the open document on the right
The exported PDF open in Apple Preview, with a nested table-of-contents sidebar
The export

⌘E, and it's a real PDF.

Vaelora measures the whole document first, then writes the PDF — so everything lands exactly where the preview said it would.

  • Navigable outline — every heading in the PDF sidebar, nested correctly.
  • A table of contents that never lies — page numbers come from measured geometry, and every entry is a clickable link.
  • Links that work — footnotes, URLs, and cross-references all survive the trip.
  • No print dialog — one keystroke, one save panel, done.
And everything else

The small things add up.

Presets

Save a style, page setup, and header/footer as a named preset. Apply it to any document with one click.

Multiple windows

Every document opens in its own window with its own settings, zoom, and view mode.

Table of contents

Generate a TOC with live page numbers — it skips the unnumbered front matter and only lists what follows it.

Per-document cleanup

Shift heading levels, strip emoji, flatten heading formatting, or drop horizontal rules — without touching your source.

Fit zoom

The preview fits your window by default, or zooms 50–200% with ⌘+ and ⌘−. A word count keeps you honest.

App-wide defaults

Set your preferred style, page setup, and content options once in Settings — every new document starts there.

Light & dark

The app follows your system appearance. Your document stays a document — white pages, either way.

Truly native

SwiftUI, sandboxed, notarized. No Electron, no bundled browser, no runtime dependencies.

Private by design

Everything happens on your Mac. No accounts, no telemetry, nothing leaves your machine.

Try it

See it with your own Markdown.

Drop in the messiest document you have. That's the demo that counts.

Download .dmg Coming to the Mac App Store

Free download · Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later · Apple silicon & Intel