PDF to Markdown, explained
Get the text out of a PDF as Markdown you can edit, paste into a wiki or hand to another tool. The converter reads the text layer of every page, joins the lines of each paragraph back together and turns bullet points into real Markdown lists.
What is converted, and how
- Paragraphs
- Lines the PDF wrapped are joined again, so each paragraph is one Markdown paragraph that reflows wherever you paste it.
- Lists
- Lines that start with •, – or * become a bulleted list;
1.and1)a numbered list. - Short lines
- Addresses, table rows and other short lines keep their line breaks.
- Pages
- Follow each other without page breaks.
Limitations
- Headings, bold and italics are not recognised: a PDF stores positioned text, not structure. Add the
#headings afterwards. - Tables come through as lines of text with the columns separated by spaces, and text set in two columns comes out side by side on the same lines.
- Scanned PDFs are pictures of text without a text layer, and the converter doesn't do text recognition (OCR). Password-protected PDFs can't be read either.
- At most 50 pages and 2 MB per PDF. Images, attachments, links and scripts in the PDF are ignored.
Tips
- Want an editable document instead? Use PDF to Word.
- Check the result once against the PDF: running headers, footers and page numbers are part of the text and end up in the Markdown too.
- The file is converted in an isolated, temporary workspace on our server and deleted as soon as the result has been sent back. It is never stored or logged.