PDF to Markdown

How to convert a PDF to Markdown

1. Add the PDF you want to convert.
2. Tick the page-break option if you want a horizontal rule between pages.
3. Press Convert to Markdown.
4. The Markdown appears on the page, with a Save button for a .md file.

About this tool

Converting a PDF to Markdown produces plain text with its structure marked up — headings as #, bullets as -, numbered lists as numbers. This free converter does it in your browser, with nothing uploaded.

Markdown has become the format that documentation, wikis, static sites and — increasingly — AI tools all read. Getting a PDF into it usually means either copying and pasting, which loses every heading and turns lists into loose lines, or uploading the document to a service that will do it properly. The first is tedious and the second is a poor idea for anything confidential.

The interesting problem is that a PDF has no headings. It has text drawn at coordinates in a font at a size, and heading-ness is something a human reader infers. This converter infers it the same way: it measures which type size most of the document is set in, treats sizes meaningfully larger than that as headings, ranks those sizes into levels, and recognises the shapes that are unambiguous — bullet characters, numbered items, and lines that end a sentence. On reports, articles, papers and manuals that produces clean, well-structured Markdown. It will not untangle a multi-column magazine layout or reconstruct a complex table, and a scanned document has no text to read at all — run that through OCR first.

Frequently asked questions

How does it know what is a heading?

By type size. It finds the size most of the body text uses and treats anything meaningfully larger as a heading, ranking the distinct larger sizes into levels.

Are tables converted?

Not into Markdown tables. Table text is extracted but the grid structure is not reconstructed, because a PDF does not record one. For tabular data, PDF to Word often gives you more to work with.

Nothing was extracted from my PDF. Why?

It is almost certainly a scan — a picture of a page rather than text. Run it through OCR first, then convert the result.

Is my document uploaded?

No. The text is extracted and converted entirely in your browser.

Why is my multi-column document jumbled?

Text is read in the order the PDF stores it, which in a two-column layout often runs across the columns rather than down them. Single-column documents convert cleanly.