PDF to
Markdown
Convert PDF documents to clean Markdown text. It runs entirely in your browser, and your file never leaves your device.
Click to upload a PDF file
Turning PDF reports into ongoing documentation?
md0 CMS gives you a visual editor over a GitHub repo, so once a PDF becomes Markdown, your team can keep it up to date without hand-editing files or wrestling with PDFs again.
What gets extracted
Structure
- Large text → # Headings
- Medium text → ## Subheadings
- Body text → Paragraphs
Not supported
- Scanned/image-only PDFs (no OCR)
- Tables and multi-column layouts
- Embedded images
Why convert PDF to markdown?
PDFs are built for fixed-layout printing. Markdown is plain text you can version in Git, edit in any editor, and feed directly into an LLM or static site generator without parsing overhead at read time.
Common reasons to convert
- Turning a PDF report or paper into editable notes
- Feeding PDF content into an LLM or RAG pipeline as clean context
- Extracting text from a PDF for a documentation rewrite
- Archiving a PDF's content as plain, diffable text
When to use this tool
Turning a research paper into editable notes
You have a PDF whitepaper or academic paper and want to annotate, excerpt, or restructure its content. Retyping headings and paragraphs by hand is slow. Convert it here first and edit the resulting Markdown directly in any text editor.
Feeding a PDF into an LLM or RAG pipeline
You are building a pipeline that answers questions over a set of PDF manuals or reports. Raw PDF text often loses paragraph and heading structure when extracted naively, which hurts chunking quality. Converting to Markdown first preserves headings as real heading markers, giving the pipeline better structure to split on.
Rewriting a PDF spec as living documentation
A legacy PDF spec or design doc needs to move into your docs site or GitHub wiki so it stays current. Convert it to Markdown as a starting draft, then edit and maintain it in place instead of re-exporting a new PDF every time something changes.
How the conversion works
Step 1: read each text item's font size
The tool reads every text item in the PDF along with the font size it was rendered at, using PDF.js to access the document's positioned text layer.
Step 2: determine the document's baseline body-text size
It compares every line's font size against the most common size across the whole document, and treats that most-common size as ordinary body text.
Step 3: classify larger sizes as headings by level
Lines rendered noticeably larger than the baseline become headings, with the largest sizes mapped to higher-level headings (# and ##) and smaller-but-still-larger sizes mapped to lower levels. Everything at the baseline size or below joins the surrounding paragraph text. PDFs store only positioned text and fonts, not semantic structure, so this heuristic gets close but stops short of true structural extraction.
Frequently asked questions
Does this handle scanned PDFs?
No. This tool reads text embedded in the PDF itself. A scanned document with no embedded text layer is just an image to this tool, since it has no OCR step. If your PDF was created by printing or exporting from a word processor, it will have a text layer and will work.
Does it preserve tables?
Not reliably. PDF tables are positioned text with no underlying table structure, so this tool extracts the text but doesn't reconstruct rows and columns. For tabular PDF data, expect the cell text to come through as plain lines that need manual reformatting.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. The entire conversion happens in your browser using PDF.js. The tool reads and processes your file locally on your device and never sends it to a server.