PDF to Markdown

What the Markdown captures

The converter reads the position, size and font of every run of text on each page, rebuilds lines and paragraphs from the geometry, and writes each piece in its Markdown form.

• Wrapped lines are joined back into whole paragraphs, so you do not get a line break in the middle of every sentence.
• Text noticeably larger than the body becomes a #, ## or ### heading, which keeps the document's outline and lets note apps build a table of contents.
• Bold and italic text is wrapped in ** and *, read from the font names embedded in the PDF.
• Lines that start with a bullet or a number become Markdown list items, with nesting preserved for indented items.
• Links in the PDF become [text](address) links, as long as they point at a web address or an email.
• Rows of evenly spaced values, the way most simple tables are set, become a Markdown table when two or more consecutive rows have the same number of cells.
• Characters that mean something in Markdown, such as asterisks, underscores and a # at the start of a line, are escaped, so plain text in the PDF stays plain text instead of turning into formatting by accident.

Where it needs help

• A scanned PDF is a picture of text with nothing to read, and the tool will say so. Run it through OCR first, then convert the result.
• Multi-column pages are read straight across the full width, which interleaves the columns line by line. Expect to reorder text from a two-column paper.
• Tables with merged cells, empty cells or values that wrap onto two lines do not line up as clean rows, so they come through as plain lines of text rather than a table.
• Images, charts and diagrams are not carried over. Markdown can only link to an image file, and there is no file to link to.
• Running headers, footers and page numbers are ordinary text in a PDF and will appear in the output. Delete them, or turn on page markers to see where each page begins.
• Text rotated at an angle, such as a DRAFT stamp or a margin note, is left out so it does not land in the middle of a sentence.
• A password-protected PDF has to be unlocked before it can be read.

Using the output well

• Markdown is the best input format for an AI assistant: it keeps headings, lists and tables, which helps the model follow the document, while staying far smaller than the PDF.
• Paste it straight into Obsidian, Notion, GitHub, a docs site or a static site generator, all of which read Markdown natively.
• Turn on page markers when you need to cite or check a passage against the original, since the rule shows where each page starts.
• Check numbers in financial or legal documents against the PDF. The text itself is copied exactly, but a table that did not line up may present values in a different order.
• Copy puts the whole document on your clipboard; Download saves a .md file named after your PDF.
• The conversion happens in your browser, so a contract, a medical letter or an internal report can be prepared for a chatbot or a wiki without first being uploaded to a converter.