Glide effortlessly from Markdown to polished documents.
Skate turns a folder of plain Markdown files into print-ready PDFs and slide decks, with a live preview that matches the export exactly.
Skate is a document tool we built and use ourselves, because reformatting the same report in a word processor every time the content changed wasn't worth anyone's time. Write Markdown the same way you'd write any note, and the tool owns everything about how it prints.
What's on screen while editing is exactly what comes out the other end. The preview isn't a rough approximation of the export, it's the same renderer, so there's never a gap between what someone saw while writing and what showed up in the PDF.
The document library, live preview, and slideshow view, all open at once.
A letterhead only has to be built once. Assign it to a single document or set it as the library default, and every export, logo mark, page numbers, footer, all of it, carries it automatically. The same source can also become a slide deck, complete with speaker notes and a presenter view for running the room.
A letterhead template, edited live against a real page.
Presenter view: notes and a timer on one screen, the deck on the other.
The polished desktop app is the smallest part of what it does. The same rendering engine also runs as a drop-and-go service: hand it a Markdown file, a folder, or a zip, and get a finished PDF back. It's also a full API, for bundling documentation, generating it on a schedule, or shipping it straight to a CDN with nobody watching.
Drop a file or folder in, get a branded PDF back. No library, no setup.
What it does
- A live preview that's pixel-for-pixel what gets exported, not a separate template
- Hot reload: save the source file in any editor and the preview updates instantly
- Diagrams, syntax-highlighted code, and numbered footnotes, straight from plain Markdown
- Tagging and a filterable library, so a large document collection stays navigable
- Light and dark while editing; exports always print light, since that's what holds up on paper
- Deterministic output: the same source always renders to the same result
- A headless mode for automated pipelines, so a document can regenerate with nobody there to click export