PDF to Markdown Converter
Convert a PDF to Markdown in your browser. Headings, paragraphs, lists and code blocks are rebuilt from the text layer. Free, private, nothing is uploaded.
Your file is read in your browser and never uploaded. Works on PDFs with selectable text. Scanned PDFs (photos of pages) need OCR first.
How to convert a PDF to Markdown
Choose a PDF and the tool pulls out its text layer and rebuilds structure from it. Everything runs in your browser with pdf.js, so the document never leaves your machine. That matters for contracts, internal docs and anything else you would not paste into an upload form.
A PDF does not store headings, lists or paragraphs. It stores text runs at x/y positions with a font and size. Turning that back into Markdown means guessing structure, and this tool is upfront about how it guesses:
- Headings: text set noticeably larger than the body font becomes a heading. The largest size becomes
#, the next##, down to four levels. - Paragraphs: lines with normal line spacing are joined into one paragraph. A bigger gap starts a new one. Words split by a hyphen at a line end are rejoined.
- Lists: lines starting with a bullet character or a number become Markdown list items.
- Code: runs of monospaced text become fenced code blocks.
- Headers and footers: text repeated in the top or bottom margin of most pages (page numbers, running titles) is removed.
Known limitations
| Thing in the PDF | What you get |
|---|---|
| Tables | Not detected. The cell text comes out as plain lines, and the tool warns when it sees table-like spacing. Rebuild them with the Markdown Table Creator or paste into the Table Formatter. |
| Bold, italic, links | Not carried over. Only structure (headings, lists, code) is inferred. |
| Images and diagrams | Dropped. Only text is extracted. |
| Scanned or photographed pages | No text layer, so nothing to extract. Run OCR first. |
| Multi-column layouts | Text may interleave across columns, depending on how the PDF was produced. |
| Math and footnotes | Come through as plain text in reading order. |
Treat the result as a good first draft, not a finished document. Paste it into the Markdown Editor to fix it up with a live preview, and run the Markdown Linter to catch skipped heading levels.
When to use this
- Moving documentation from PDF into a docs-as-code repo or wiki
- Feeding a report or paper into an LLM or notes app that works better with Markdown
- Quoting from a PDF without retyping it
- Cleaning up a PDF exported from Word. If you still have the original
.docx, the Word to Markdown converter keeps much more (tables, bold, links).
Related tools
- Markdown to PDF for the reverse direction
- Word to Markdown
- HTML to Markdown
- Markdown Editor