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PDF to Markdown

Extract PDF content to clean Markdown — the reliable way to get text out.

Choose PDF file or drop it anywhere on this page PDF Processed on your device — never uploaded

How to pdf to markdown

  1. Open a PDF.
  2. Choose whether to infer headings and whether to include page breaks.
  3. Download the Markdown file.

About this tool

PDF to Markdown is the conversion that actually works. Instead of trying to reconstruct a layout that cannot be reliably inferred — and producing mangled tables and misaligned paragraphs as a result — this approach extracts what can be extracted cleanly: the text, the reading order, and the relative importance of different text elements via heading inference.

The result is a portable plain-text file that opens anywhere, feeds into any tool, and can be version-controlled in Git. For research papers, reports, documentation and books, the Markdown export is a genuinely useful output. For anything where the original visual layout matters, you need a different approach — this prioritises fidelity of content over fidelity of appearance.

Questions

Why is Markdown better than Word for PDF conversion?
Word conversion attempts to reconstruct columns, spacing and text box positions — structure that cannot be inferred reliably from PDF coordinates. Markdown conversion makes no such attempt: it extracts the text in reading order, applies heading inference based on font size, and outputs something clean and predictable. The trade-off is that you get content without layout, not content pretending to have the original layout.
Can I feed the output directly to an LLM?
Yes, and this is one of the primary use cases. Most language models handle Markdown well: the # heading structure provides document hierarchy without the noise of HTML tags, and the plain text is token-efficient. A 50-page PDF becomes a Markdown file the model can reason about without the image-rendering overhead of pasting the whole PDF.
Does it handle footnotes and headers/footers?
Footnote text appears in the extraction in position order, which usually means after the page content where it was physically located. Headers and footers repeat on every page and will appear repeated in the output. For long documents, you may want to trim them out after extraction.