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PDF to Markdown
Clean .md for notes and LLMs. Free, no sign-up.
or drop it here
PDF to Markdown runs inside your browser — your file never reaches our servers.
How to convert PDF to Markdown
Text is extracted page by page into Markdown — useful for note systems like Obsidian, and for giving a document to an AI tool without handing over the PDF.
- Select your PDF. Any text-based PDF.
- Convert. Text is extracted in reading order, with optional page markers.
- Download the .md. Plain Markdown you can paste anywhere.
What is actually in the .md file
The first line is a level-one heading made from your file's name without its extension, so quarterly-review.pdf becomes a document titled quarterly-review — worth renaming the file before you convert. With page marks left on, every page is introduced by a horizontal rule and an HTML comment carrying the page number: invisible once the Markdown is rendered, findable by a text search, and a dependable anchor for citing a passage or chunking the document into an index.
The text itself is the PDF's own text layer. Every text item on a page is read and joined with single spaces, so one page arrives as one continuous block. Nothing else is reconstructed — no bold, no bullets, no pipe tables — because a PDF stores type sizes and positions rather than the fact that a line was a subheading. Running headers, footers and page numbers land inline in the prose, and a table's cells become words on a line. If the tables are the point, PDF to Excel rebuilds real rows and columns; for the styling, PDF to Word.
The scan problem, and how to spot it
This tool does not run OCR. A scanned or photographed PDF has no text layer to read, so it converts happily and hands back a file holding the title, a row of page rules and page comments, and no words at all. The note under the download gives a character count, and that count includes the marks — roughly twenty characters a page — so an empty result never reads as zero. A forty-page scan coming back under a thousand characters is the tell, where the real document would run to tens of thousands. Run OCR PDF first to write a real text layer, then convert that.
A glance at the output is worth it on ordinary PDFs too. Pages set in two columns come out in the order the file stores them, which is usually column by column but is not guaranteed by the format, and a heavily designed page can interleave. Read the first converted page before you paste twenty of them into anything.
Questions
Does it detect headings and lists?
Page structure and reading order are preserved, with page markers as separators. Heading detection from visual styling is not exact — a PDF stores type sizes, not semantics, so review the result for structure-critical work.
Why would I want Markdown?
Large language models handle Markdown far better than raw PDF, and note apps store it natively. Converting locally also means the document itself never goes to an AI service.
Should I leave the page marks on?
Leave them on if you will cite page numbers, split the file for a search index, or need to trace a sentence back to the original. Turn them off when you want continuous prose to paste into a document, where the rules and comments break the flow of a quotation.
Are images or figures extracted?
No. The output is text only, with no image links and no figure files. If you need the pictures, <a href="/pdf-to-jpg">PDF to JPG</a> exports every page as an image; a figure's caption will still be in the Markdown as ordinary text.
Why do some words have a hyphen and a space in the middle?
The PDF broke that word across two lines, and the hyphen belongs to the page rather than the word. Extraction joins the pieces with a space, so the hyphenated break survives as one. A careful find-and-replace clears them, and language models read straight through them.
Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. Every tool on this site runs inside your browser, using the same engine as the Folia desktop app. Your file is read from your disk into your browser’s memory, processed there, and handed back as a download. It never crosses the internet, so there is nothing for us to store, leak or hand over.
Is there a file size limit?
We impose none. The only ceiling is your own device’s memory, which differs from one computer to another — so we read what your browser reports about this machine and show the resulting limit on the page. Light tools like merge and rotate handle far more than heavy ones like OCR, which must render every page. For anything larger, Folia for Desktop has no limit at all.
Is it really free? Do I need an account?
Yes, and no. Every tool is free and unlimited, with no watermark and no sign-up. Ads pay for the site, and your own computer does the work, which costs us nothing. Signing in with a paid Folia plan simply removes the ads.