Choose a PDF and get its text back as Markdown: headings worked out from the font sizes, lists kept as lists, paragraphs joined up properly. The file is read in this browser tab and never leaves your device.
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Markdown is the plain-text format behind README files, wikis, note-taking apps like Obsidian and Notion, static websites and a great deal of technical documentation. A PDF, on the other hand, is a printed page in digital form: it records where each letter sits on the paper, not that a line is a heading or that three lines belong to one list. This tool reads the text of the PDF together with its position and size, and rebuilds the structure that Markdown needs.
Lines that are noticeably larger than the body text become headings, the largest becoming a level-one heading and smaller ones level two and three. Lines that start with a bullet, a dash or a number followed by a full stop become Markdown list items. Lines that belong to one paragraph are joined, so you do not get a hard line break at the end of every printed line, which is the usual problem when you copy and paste out of a PDF reader.
Headings, ordinary paragraphs, bullet lists and numbered lists come across well, and so does the reading order of a normal single-column document. Characters that Markdown would treat as formatting, such as an asterisk or an underscore in the middle of a sentence, are escaped by default so the rendered page shows exactly the words in the PDF. You can switch escaping off if you plan to edit the file by hand.
Tables, columns, pictures, footnotes and page headers are a different matter. A PDF stores a table as a set of words placed at particular coordinates; it does not record rows, columns or cells. Guessing that structure from positions is unreliable, so this tool deliberately keeps table text as ordinary lines rather than producing a Markdown table that may be wrong. If the table is the part you need, PDF to Excel is built for exactly that job. Pictures are not extracted; the Markdown file holds text only.
Two-column layouts, as in academic papers and magazines, can come out with the columns interleaved, because the PDF itself does not say which column a line belongs to. Single-column documents, reports, manuals, letters and most e-book PDFs convert cleanly.
If your PDF came from a scanner or a phone camera, each page is a photograph. There is no text inside it to read, so the Markdown file would be empty and the page tells you so. Run the file through OCR PDF on this site first: it recognises the text in English or Marathi and produces a PDF with a real text layer, which this tool can then convert.
A quick way to check: open the PDF and try to select a word with the mouse. If you can highlight individual words, the PDF has text and this converter will work. If the whole page highlights as one block, it is a scan.
Moving documentation into a Git repository or a wiki, turning a PDF report into notes you can link and search, preparing text for a static site generator, and feeding a document into tools that work on plain text are all common reasons. Markdown is also a comfortable format to read and edit in any text editor, so it is a good way to make a long PDF easier to quote from.
Because the result is plain text, it is small and easy to compare between versions. A 40-page PDF typically becomes a Markdown file of a few dozen kilobytes.
Expect to tidy the file a little afterwards. Page numbers, running headers and footers print on every page of the PDF, so they appear in the text once per page; delete them with a quick search and replace. Hyphenated words split across two lines are joined where the hyphen clearly ends a line, but a word broken over a page break may stay split. Check the headings too: a line in large type that was really a pull quote will have become a heading.
The PDF is opened by a PDF reader that runs inside this page. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and the file is forgotten when you close the tab. Password-protected PDFs can be read if you type the password; it is used only on your device.
No. A PDF does not store rows and columns, only word positions, so table text is kept as plain lines rather than guessed into a table that might be wrong. For tables, use PDF to Excel.
By text size. Lines noticeably larger than the body text become headings, the largest first. A document that uses bold text of the normal size for its headings will not get Markdown headings.
The PDF is almost certainly a scan, so it holds pictures rather than text. Run it through OCR PDF first, then convert the result.
Yes. Type a range such as 2-5 or 1,4,9 in the pages box. Leave it empty for the whole document.
It puts a backslash before characters Markdown would read as formatting, such as * and _, so the rendered page shows your text exactly. Untick it if you will edit the file by hand.
No. It is read in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.
Your answer is stored in this browser only. It is not sent to us and no totals are counted.