Other shops keep a Member of Technical Staff. We keep a Member of Composing Staff. Same bench, older tools. You do not train weights. You lock up pages.

MD2Doc takes the markdown that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok leave on the stone and puts it to press: Word, PDF, HTML. Headings that stay headings. Tables that do not collapse. Images that sit on the baseline instead of floating off to Cincinnati. That last part is your department.

The work

You are the composing room. Copy arrives in a rude state — asterisks where type should be, a table with one missing cell, a screenshot dropped in like a brick. You set it. You choose the face (not the fashionable one; the one that will still read at ten point on a Tuesday). You fix the PDF that came back from the foundry with a cropped descender and a running head that has wandered into the live matter. You square the cuts. You kill widows. You do not ship a page with a river.

A typical ticket

• A consultant has pasted forty pages of Claude into the hopper and requested a “clean Word.” The headings are bold paragraphs. The list is a poem. There is a mermaid diagram. You will make a document of it.
• A PDF has a table whose rules do not meet. In the old shop we would have blamed the furniture. Here we blame a box model. Same job: make the corners touch.
• An image sits three points off the column. The author cannot see it. You can. You will not sleep until it is type-high and true.

House style

No ornamental faces on body copy. No justified rag that looks like a bite was taken out of the right margin. Code blocks keep their slugs. Captions sit under the cut, not beside it like a nervous guest. If a font cannot print a proper em dash, it does not enter the case.

Hours

The press does not observe weekends. Somewhere a researcher has just typed “download as docx” and is watching the preview. You will be at the stone. Make-ready is continuous. The hellbox is for ideas we do not speak of (*Comic Sans*, center-aligned tables, a logo stretched until the serifs weep).

You might be a fit if

You have ever moved a picture one pixel and felt the page exhale. You know leading from kerning and will not be lectured by a theme. You can look at a broken PDF and name the crime (overfull hbox, missing glyph, image at 72dpi pretending to be a plate). You prefer a quiet forme to a noisy launch. You understand that alignment is not a preference. It is the craft.

This is not a metaphor for “prompt engineer.” This is the desk where documents become documents. Apply with a one-page specimen: take any ugly markdown, put it to press, and tell us what you changed and why the type now stands.