Convert PDF to Markdown
PDF text as structured Markdown — right in your browser.
No upload: your PDFs stay on your device
Text extraction runs entirely in your browser — no upload, no server, no registration. Confidential reports, contracts or internal documents are safe to convert to Markdown.
PDFs are made for reading and printing, not for further processing: the text is locked into a fixed layout without logical structure. If you want to move the content into a wiki, keep editing it in an editor, or hand it to an AI tool, you first have to get it back out — which is exactly what this converter does by turning PDF into Markdown.
The text is extracted page by page and the structure is reconstructed: the converter detects headings from the font-size ratio relative to the body text and emits them as #, ## or ### headings. Short bold lines are treated as subheadings, and page breaks are marked with separator lines.
Good to know: detection is heuristic and works best with text-based PDFs and clear typography. Scanned PDFs (images of text) would require OCR, which this converter does not offer; tables and multi-column layouts are not reconstructed either. If your document also exists as a Word file, take the DOCX to Markdown route instead — there, tables and images are fully preserved.
Why convert PDF to Markdown?
AI workflows: PDFs as LLM context
PDFs are a difficult input format for language models: layout artifacts and missing structure dilute the context. Handed over as Markdown, ChatGPT, Claude and friends receive clean, structured text with detected headings — which noticeably improves summaries, analyses and answers.
Research & knowledge bases
Reports, papers and brochures often exist only as PDFs. Converted to Markdown, they become searchable, linkable and quotable in Obsidian, Notion or a wiki — instead of sitting as closed files in your downloads folder.
Migrating documentation
If you want to move existing PDF manuals or guides into a modern documentation system — a wiki, a Git repository or a static site generator — the conversion gives you a structured Markdown base you can then refine deliberately, instead of copying everything out of the PDF viewer by hand.
How to convert a PDF file to Markdown
- Drag your .pdf file into the box above or click to select it.
- The text is extracted page by page and output as Markdown with detected headings. Check the result in the preview.
- If needed, fix individual headings directly in the Markdown tab, then download the result as an .md file.
PDF conversion questions
Why are some headings not detected?
Heading detection is based on the font-size ratio relative to the body text: clearly larger lines become # or ## headings, slightly larger or short bold lines become ###. If a PDF sets headings at the same size as the body text — just bold or colored — they may pass through as regular text. You can fix this directly in the Markdown tab of the result.
Do scanned PDFs work?
No. Scanned PDFs contain images of text rather than real, selectable text. Turning those into Markdown would require OCR (optical character recognition), which this converter does not currently offer. Only PDFs whose text can be selected and copied in a PDF viewer are suitable — which is also the quickest test before converting.
Are tables preserved from PDFs?
No. The PDF format stores tables only as individually positioned text fragments without row and column structure — reliable reconstruction as a Markdown table is not possible, so this converter deliberately does not attempt it. If the document also exists as a Word file, the DOCX route is worth taking: there, tables are fully converted to Markdown pipe tables.
What does the separator line (---) in the result mean?
Every page break in the PDF is marked with a horizontal rule (---) in the Markdown. This keeps track of which content came from which page after conversion — helpful when proofreading long documents. If you don't need the markers, simply delete the lines in the Markdown tab or in your editor after downloading.