Markdown to PDF Speed Comparison 2026 07 11

Markdown-to-PDF Speed Comparison

Run date: 2026-07-11.

Result

RayoMD was the fastest converter in every case in this local comparison. Its median end-to-end time was 74.2x to 113.4x faster than the next-fastest tool.

Marketing-safe claim:

RayoMD is the fastest Markdown-to-PDF converter in our July 2026 Windows tests, beating Pandoc/XeLaTeX and the popular Node md-to-pdf tool by at least 74x across three synthetic small-to-medium Markdown workloads.

This does not prove that RayoMD is universally the fastest converter in the world. It proves that it is the fastest of these tested tools, on this machine, for these inputs and settings. Use the scoped wording above rather than an unqualified "fastest in the world" claim.

Results

Case	Input	RayoMD	Pandoc + XeLaTeX	md-to-pdf	RayoMD vs next fastest
Tiny README	205 B	17.93 ms	3,022.02 ms	1,655.77 ms	92.3x
Medium feature mix	15,102 B	19.74 ms	3,324.44 ms	2,238.22 ms	113.4x
500-row table	33,353 B	30.64 ms	3,302.67 ms	2,272.99 ms	74.2x

Measured timing ranges were 17.30-31.32 ms for RayoMD, 2,986.24-3,492.52 ms for Pandoc/XeLaTeX, and 1,590.58-2,282.82 ms for md-to-pdf.

Method

• Gigabyte B550 AORUS ELITE system with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X processor (6 cores, 12 threads), 128 GiB RAM, and Windows 11 Pro build 26200.
• RayoMD 2.0.0 native mode, Pandoc 3.9.0.1 with MiKTeX-XeTeX 4.16, and md-to-pdf 5.2.5 on Node 25.8.1.
• md-to-pdf is the actively maintained Marked + Puppeteer/Chromium pipeline; its npm page reported about 156,000 weekly downloads when this report was prepared: https://www.npmjs.com/package/md-to-pdf.
• Each measurement launches a fresh process and includes startup, Markdown parsing, PDF generation, and writing the output file.
• One uncounted warm-up was followed by seven measured runs. The table reports the median. Each run overwrote the same destination file.
• The corpus was deterministic and local, with no remote resources.
• Every generated file was checked for a PDF header, EOF marker, and a non-trivial size.

The three converters do not promise identical rendering or feature coverage. Pandoc/XeLaTeX is a much more complete publishing system, while md-to-pdf uses browser rendering and includes richer CSS and syntax highlighting. RayoMD's native renderer deliberately supports a smaller Markdown subset. The comparison answers how quickly each complete command produces a valid PDF when that subset is sufficient; it is not a visual-equivalence benchmark.

The older Node markdown-pdf package was excluded from the primary comparison because it uses PhantomJS and its npm release was four years old at the time of testing. Choosing the newer, much more frequently downloaded md-to-pdf avoids inflating the result with an obsolete comparator.

Reproduce

Install the Node comparator into the ignored benchmark output directory:

npm install --prefix benchmark-output\world-fastest-tooling md-to-pdf@5.2.5

Build RayoMD and run the comparison:

cmake --build build\windows --config Release
python scripts\compare_markdown_pdf_tools.py `
  --rayomd build\windows\rayomd.exe `
  --node-modules benchmark-output\world-fastest-tooling\node_modules `
  --root benchmark-output\world-fastest-20260711 `
  --runs 7

The ignored output directory contains the generated corpus, final PDFs, record.json with full min/median/max data, and a compact summary.md.