Markdown in. Magazine-typeset HTML, PDF, and EPUB out. Drop caps. Real hyphenation. Sidenotes in the margin. The works.
No account. No download. The engine runs in your browser.
Substack posts look like Substack posts. Medium articles look like Medium articles. ChatGPT-written ebooks look like ChatGPT-written ebooks. The visual signature of produced quickly, default-styled has become a tell. Readers feel it before they can name it.
Your writing deserves better than that.
Paste a paragraph. Pick a font. Watch Pilcrow set it the way print does — drop cap, 65-character lines, real en-gb hyphenation, balanced line endings, sidenotes in the margin.
No account. No download. The engine runs in your browser.
Canva gives you a layout — a poster, a deck, a brochure shell. The text on it is whatever font you picked from a dropdown. That's why a Canva carousel looks like a Canva carousel.
Pilcrow doesn't lay out the page; the page is the layout. We set the type the way a printer would: drop cap on the lede, 65-character lines, real hyphenation, sidenotes in the margin. Every blog post, every page of a brochure, every chapter of a book gets the same craft treatment.
You can spot a Canva piece in a feed. The point of Pilcrow is that you can't spot ours — it just reads better.
You want your writing to look like it's from The Atlantic, not from a CMS template. Hosted blog at your own domain. Web editor. Drop caps, sidenotes, real hyphenation. Set like a magazine.
Manuscript ready, but it doesn't look like a real book yet. Upload your Markdown, Word, or Google Doc. Get back a print-ready PDF, an EPUB, and a sample web chapter — all properly typeset.
Brochures, thought-leadership PDFs, brand-led blogs. Output that reads like £2,000 of editorial design, not like a Canva template. Custom fonts, custom palette, multi-author.
In Markdown, in our web editor, or by uploading your Word document. The way you already work — we don't make you learn a new tool.
Our engine runs the same typesetting pipeline as a print compositor: hyphenation dictionary, line-break optimisation, drop-cap measurement, sidenote alignment. Build time, not browser time.
Your blog goes live at your domain. Your book becomes a print-ready PDF and EPUB. Your brochure becomes a download. Set once, ready everywhere.
Every post on this site is typeset by the engine you'd use. A few recent ones:
The Pilcrow Press gallery is a curated directory of blogs, newsletters, and brand publications typeset with Pilcrow. Every entry is hand-picked. Click in to read; trace the typography back to the engine.
The gallery opens in summer 2026 with the closed-beta cohort. Want to be considered? Join the waitlist.
For developers running the engine themselves.
npx create-pilcrow
For the blog or newsletter that should look like yours.
For the manuscript that's finished.
For brand publications and thought-leadership content.
|
Free OSS |
Writer £12/mo |
Author £29/book |
Business £49/mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pilcrow engine | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Self-host | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Hosted blog | — | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Custom domain | — | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Web editor | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Book PDF + EPUB | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Brand kit (custom fonts) | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Multi-author (up to 5) | — | — | — | ✓ |
| White-label footer | — | — | — | ✓ |
All plans include our six-font shortlist (Fraunces, Newsreader, Source Serif 4, EB Garamond, Inter, Spectral), drop caps, real en-gb hyphenation, sidenotes, footnotes, pull quotes, OG cards, and RSS. The engine doesn't change between tiers — only what surrounds it.
Annual billing saves ~30%. Cancel anytime. We don't lock you in — your content exports as Markdown plus your typeset PDF/EPUB whenever you want it.
pilcrow-typeset. The paid
plans are about the SaaS surface (hosted blogs, the web editor,
custom fonts, support) — not about gatekeeping the engine.
Open the playground. Paste a paragraph. See your writing set the way it should have been all along.
Or read the engine on GitHub.