PDF to Markdown
Convert a PDF into clean Markdown for docs and LLM pipelines.
How to use PDF to Markdown
- Add a PDF that contains selectable text, not scanned images.
- Decide whether to separate pages with a horizontal rule and whether bare URLs become links.
- Press Convert to Markdown and watch it read page by page.
- Review the preview, then copy it to the clipboard or download a .md file.
How PDF to Markdown works
Markdown is what documentation systems, static site generators and language-model pipelines actually want to be fed. This tool reads the text layer inside a PDF and rewrites it as plain Markdown, structure included.
Structure is inferred from font size. The tool measures every line in the document, takes the median size as the baseline for body text, and promotes lines that sit clearly above it: roughly 10% larger becomes a level-3 heading, 25% larger a level-2, and 50% larger a level-1. Lines starting with a bullet character or a number followed by a dot become list items, and consecutive body lines are joined into paragraphs, with sentence-ending punctuation used to decide where a paragraph closes.
Characters that Markdown would otherwise interpret — asterisks, underscores, backticks, brackets — are escaped in headings so your text survives intact. Optionally, bare URLs are converted into Markdown links, and pages can be separated by a horizontal rule with an HTML comment recording the page number.
The result is shown in a preview pane before you commit to anything, so you can judge the structure and then either copy it or download it as a .md file.
Frequently asked questions
Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. This tool runs entirely inside your browser — the file is read from disk by the page and never transmitted. It keeps working even if you disconnect after the page has loaded.
How are headings detected?
By relative font size, not by any tag in the file — most PDFs contain no structural markup at all. The median line size in your document becomes the baseline, and lines meaningfully larger than it are promoted to headings. This works well for reports and articles with a consistent type scale, and less well for documents where headings are the same size as body text and only bold.
What happens to tables?
They come through as text, not as Markdown tables. Table cells in a PDF are positioned text with no grid information attached, so reconstructing rows and columns reliably is not something this tool attempts. Expect the cell contents in reading order, and expect to rebuild the table yourself.
My PDF produced nothing — why?
Almost certainly it is a scan. Scanned pages are images with no text layer, so there is nothing to extract. The tool detects this and tells you rather than handing back an empty file. Getting text out of a scan requires OCR, which is not available here yet; PDF to JPG will at least give you the page images.
Are images from the PDF included?
No. Only the text layer is read. Images stay in the original PDF and are not extracted or referenced in the Markdown. If you need the visuals too, run the file through PDF to JPG separately.
Why would I want Markdown rather than Word?
Markdown is plain text, so it goes straight into a repository, a documentation site, a note-taking app or a language-model prompt without conversion. PDF to Word is the better choice when the destination is a word processor and you want to keep editing in a document.