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PDF to Markdown

Convert a PDF into Markdown with headings and lists detected.

Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded

Drop the PDF you want as Markdown

or click to browse · .pdf

Frequently asked questions

Why convert a PDF to Markdown rather than plain text?

Markdown keeps the structure that plain text throws away. Headings stay headings and lists stay lists, so the document is still navigable — and a language model reading it can tell a section title from a sentence. For a straight dump with no structure at all, use PDF to Text instead.

How are headings detected?

By font size relative to the rest of the document. The body text size is measured across every page, and lines set noticeably larger become headings, with bigger jumps becoming higher levels. This is a heuristic — a PDF records how text looks, not what it means, so a document that styles headings purely by weight or colour will not be detected as reliably.

Will tables survive the conversion?

No, and this is worth being clear about. A PDF has no concept of a table — only characters at coordinates. Cells come through as ordinary lines of text in reading order. Reconstructing a grid from that needs layout analysis well beyond what a browser tool can do honestly, so this tool does not pretend to.

Does this work on a scanned PDF?

No. A scan is an image of a page, so there is no text layer to extract and the output would be empty. The tool says so rather than handing back a blank file. Recognising text in an image needs OCR, which is a different kind of tool.

Is my document uploaded?

No. The PDF is read and parsed by your own browser, and the Markdown is produced on your device. Nothing is transmitted, which is the point — the documents people most want to feed to an AI tool are often the ones they least want to hand to a third party.

PDF to Markdown, without uploading the document

Markdown has quietly become the format that machines and humans agree on. It is what static site generators build from, what wikis and note apps store, and — increasingly the reason people want this conversion — what language models read most reliably. A PDF pasted into a chat box arrives as a jumble; the same document as Markdown arrives with its structure intact.

The catch is that the documents worth feeding to an AI assistant are usually internal: a contract, a specification, a research paper under licence, a board pack. Uploading those to a conversion service to prepare them for analysis defeats the purpose. This tool runs the extraction in your browser, so the file never leaves your device.

What the converter reconstructs

A PDF does not store paragraphs, headings or lists. It stores glyphs at coordinates — which is why copying text out of one so often produces a mess. Rebuilding structure means inferring it from geometry.

Lines are grouped from runs sharing a baseline, with the tolerance scaled to glyph height so a large heading is not split in two. Paragraphs are separated where the vertical gap grows beyond normal line spacing. Headings are lines set larger than the document's body size, with the size ladder mapped onto heading levels. Lists are recognised from leading bullet glyphs and numbering, and re-emitted as Markdown list syntax. Characters that would otherwise be read as Markdown markup are escaped, so a literal asterisk in the source stays an asterisk.

Where it stops

Tables come through as plain lines, because a PDF gives no indication that a group of text runs is a grid. Multi-column layouts — academic papers especially — are read in the order the file stores them, which is usually column by column but is not guaranteed. Images and equations are not extracted. And a scanned document has no text layer at all, so there is nothing to convert; the tool reports that rather than returning an empty file.

These are limits of the format rather than of this implementation, and every client-side converter shares them. Knowing where the output needs checking is more useful than a promise it will be perfect.

Related tools

For an unstructured dump, PDF to Text is simpler. For an editable document, use PDF to Word. For a styled web page, PDF to HTML. To count what you extracted, try the Word Counter.

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