PDF to Markdown
Turn a PDF back into Markdown, with its headings, lists and tables.
Drop files here
Or paste them, or pick them from this device. Nothing is uploaded: the work happens in this tab.
Files in this tab
Nothing is loaded yet.
Options
Which pages to convert.
Make the Markdown
Add a file to get started.
What this does
A PDF does not record that something was a heading or a list — it records type at sizes in places. This reads the page back into a document: type that is larger and heavier than its neighbours becomes a heading, lines that start with a bullet or a number become a list, ruled or aligned blocks become a table. What comes out is Markdown you can edit, put in a repository, or hand to something else.
What it will not do
Every tool here says what it cannot do, in its own words, before you rely on it.
- A PDF does not record what was a heading, a list or a table; it records type at sizes in places. All of that is inferred from the page, and a page laid out unusually will be read unusually.
- Markdown has no table without a heading row, so a table that has no obvious one is written with its first row as the heading.
- A scanned page holds a picture of words. Run OCR over it first.
- What Markdown cannot say is dropped rather than approximated: colour, exact position, the page a thing was on, and anything drawn rather than typed.
Questions people ask
How accurate is the structure?
Good on documents laid out like documents — reports, papers, manuals. Weaker on anything laid out like a poster, where there is no consistent relationship between size and meaning to infer from.
What happens to the pictures?
They are not carried into the Markdown. Run Extract images on the same file to get them, then reference them from the Markdown where you want them.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. The work happens in this browser tab, on your own machine. There is no server in this product to send a file to, which is why the promise is checkable rather than something you have to take on trust: open your browser's network panel and watch it do the work without making a request.
Is there a size limit, or a limit on how many files?
None that we impose. The limit is your own machine's memory, because that is where the work happens — a few hundred megabytes is comfortable on a laptop, and less on a phone. There is no daily task counter, no queue and no account.
What does it cost, and what is the catch?
Nothing, and there is no paid tier that unlocks features: the whole product is the free one. That is affordable because running it costs us nothing — your computer does the work — so there is no per-file cost to recover, no advertising and no data to sell.