PDF to Markdown & Text Converter
Extracts text from a PDF and uses font sizes and positions to rebuild headings, paragraphs, lists and tables as Markdown or plain text (.txt). Switch the output format with the buttons. Useful for feeding documents to AI tools, reusing their content, or just pulling the text out. Your file never leaves your device. To turn pages into images instead, try the PDF ⇔ Image Converter.
🔒 Runs in your browser · Your data is never sent to a server
You can also drag and drop a PDF file here
Choose one .pdf file.
Result
How to use
- Choose a PDF file.
- Pick the output format (Markdown or plain text).
- Toggle the options as needed: removing headers/footers, detecting tables, and inserting page separators.
- Press "Convert".
- Review the output, then copy it or download it as a .md / .txt file.
Accuracy and limitations
- Works on PDFs that contain text. Scanned image PDFs need OCR and cannot be converted.
- Headings are inferred from larger text and short bold-only lines, and tables from aligned columns. Depending on how the PDF was made, they may not be recognized correctly.
- Plain text leaves out Markdown symbols such as the # before headings and the asterisks around bold text, and outputs only the words. Reading order, joining of wrapped lines, and header/footer removal work the same as in Markdown. Tables become tab-separated rows that you can paste straight into a spreadsheet.
- Merged cells and cells with wrapped text may break a table. Please review the output.
- Two-column pages are read left column first, but layouts mixing figures and sidebars can come out in the wrong order.
- Figures, images and equations are not converted. Vertical (tategaki) text is not supported.
Glossary
Markdown
A lightweight markup syntax: "#" for headings, "-" for bullet lists and "|" for tables. It is supported by GitHub, Notion and many note-taking apps.
OCR (optical character recognition)
Technology that reads text from images. A scanned PDF holds pictures rather than text, so it must go through OCR before its text can be extracted.
GFM (GitHub Flavored Markdown)
GitHub’s extension of Markdown that adds pipe-delimited tables, strikethrough and more. This tool writes tables in GFM format.
FAQ
Can I extract just the text from a PDF?
Yes. Choose "Plain text" as the output format to get only the words, without Markdown symbols such as # or **, and download it as .txt. Reading order, joining of wrapped lines, and header/footer removal work the same as in Markdown. Tables become tab-separated rows.
Can scanned PDFs be converted?
No. Only PDFs that contain text data work. Image-only scans would require OCR, which this tool does not perform.
How accurate are headings and tables?
Headings are inferred from larger or bold short lines and tables from aligned rows. Depending on how the PDF was made, detection can fail, and tables with merged cells may break. Please review the output.
Is it useful as preprocessing for AI?
Yes. The Markdown keeps structure such as headings and lists, which suits feeding documents to AI. Note that figures, images and equations are not converted.
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