PDF to Markdown Converter

Turn any PDF into a clean Markdown file suitable for LLM ingestion, RAG pipelines, static site generators, or plain-text version control. The converter runs on Microsoft's MarkItDown library, which walks the PDF page-by-page and rebuilds headings, tables, and lists as Markdown rather than dumping raw text. Works on text-based PDFs; scanned PDFs without an embedded text layer will need an OCR pass first (try our image-to-text tool).

Drop your PDF file here

Max 20 MB · 5 conversions per hour

What this converter preserves

Preserves heading hierarchy (H1/H2/H3) so downstream tools like Docusaurus, Obsidian, and mkdocs render structure correctly
Extracts tables as GitHub-flavored Markdown pipe tables (not HTML) — parseable by every Markdown renderer
Keeps ordered and unordered list nesting intact across page breaks
Strips PDF-only cruft (page numbers, running headers, watermarks) from the Markdown output

When you'd use this

Feeding technical documentation into an LLM context window without token bloat from PDF binary metadata
Migrating a company handbook from PDF distribution to a docs-as-code workflow
Building a searchable Markdown knowledge base from scanned research papers or regulatory filings
Extracting quotable passages from books or reports for note-taking apps (Obsidian, Roam, Logseq)

How it works

1

Upload your PDF

Drop the file into the upload area or click Choose File. PDFs up to 20 MB are supported.
2

Convert to Markdown

Click Convert. The server extracts text, tables, and heading hierarchy in one pass.
3

Preview the output

The Markdown appears in a live preview pane. Copy it with one click or download as a .md file.

Frequently asked questions

Does this work on scanned PDFs?

Only if the scan has an embedded text layer (most PDFs from Adobe Scan and modern scanners do). Pure image-only scans return empty output — run the file through OCR first. We recommend our free image-to-text tool for that.

Are tables preserved?

Yes. MarkItDown extracts each PDF table and emits it as a GitHub-flavored pipe table. Complex nested tables and merged cells are flattened, since Markdown does not natively support them.

What about images inside the PDF?

Images are referenced by a placeholder note (e.g. `[Image: 3]`). The image data itself is not extracted into Markdown. If you need image content transcribed, use image-to-markdown (Tier 2, coming soon).

File size limit?

20 MB per file for the free tier. That covers ~500-page text PDFs comfortably. Larger files usually contain scanned images and should be OCRed first — you can then convert the OCR output separately.

Is the file stored anywhere?

No. Conversion happens in memory on our server; the file is discarded as soon as the Markdown response is returned. Nothing is written to disk or persisted.

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