PDF to Markdown converter
Turn any PDF into clean Markdown, with headings, lists and tables intact. It runs entirely in your browser, so your file is never uploaded.
Why convert a PDF to Markdown?
PDFs are made for printing, not for reusing. Copy text out of one and you get broken lines, stray page numbers and headings that look exactly like body text. Markdown fixes that. It’s plain text with a few simple marks, # for a heading and - for a list item, so the structure of the document survives and any app can read it.
That makes a PDF to Markdown conversion the quickest way to:
- Feed a document to ChatGPT, Claude or another AI. Models read Markdown structure well, and it uses fewer tokens than a messy paste.
- Move notes into Obsidian, Bear, Notion or Logseq, which all speak Markdown natively.
- Extract text from a PDF for docs, a README, a wiki or a website, without retyping it.
How this converter works
Most PDF to text tools sit at one of two extremes. Some grab the raw text layer and hand you a jumble of positioned strings. Others render every page to an image and ask OCR or an AI model to read it back, which is slow and usually means uploading your file.
This one reads the PDF the way it was built. Every letter in a digital PDF already has an exact position, size and font, so the converter rebuilds the reading order, headings, paragraphs, lists and tables from that geometry in milliseconds. It only runs OCR on the parts of a page that the text layer can’t explain, like a scanned page or a screenshot with text in it. Pages convert in parallel, and the Markdown appears as each page finishes.
The engine is pdffr, an open-source PDF decompiler that runs pdf.js and tesseract.js in your browser.
Private by design
Your PDF is opened and converted inside this tab. There’s no upload step and no server that ever sees the file, so it’s safe for contracts, statements and anything else you’d rather not send to a stranger’s cloud. Once the page has loaded, you can switch off Wi-Fi and it keeps working.
What to expect
Born-digital PDFs, the kind exported from Word, Pages, Google Docs or LaTeX, convert best: headings, lists, bold and italic, and most tables come through cleanly. Complex layouts are best effort. Tables with merged cells, heavy math and multi-column magazine spreads may need a quick tidy-up. For scans, the quality of the OCR depends on the quality of the scan.
Questions
Is this PDF to Markdown converter really free?
Yes. There’s no sign-up, no page limit and no watermark. The conversion runs on your own computer, so it costs us nothing to run and costs you nothing to use.
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. The PDF is read and converted inside this browser tab. The page downloads the conversion engine once, but your file never leaves your device. You can even disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it still works.
Does it work with scanned PDFs?
Yes. When a page has ink that the PDF’s text layer can’t explain, such as a scan or a screenshot with text in it, only that area is run through on-device OCR. Clean scans work best. Handwriting and very low-resolution scans may come out with mistakes.
How do I convert a PDF to Markdown for ChatGPT or another AI?
Drop the PDF here, click Copy, and paste the Markdown into the chat. Markdown keeps headings, lists and tables as structure the model can read, and it uses far fewer tokens than pasting a messy copy from a PDF viewer.
Can I just extract plain text from a PDF?
Yes. Markdown is plain text with a few marks like # for headings and - for list items. Download the .md file and open it in any text editor, or paste it into a notes app like Obsidian, Bear or Notion.
Need to edit the PDF, not just read it?
PDF Unlimited is a free PDF editor for Mac. Sign, highlight, merge, compress, redact and OCR, all offline.