Free tool

PDF to Markdown, in your browser.

Pull the text layer out of a PDF and save it as Markdown. No account, no upload — the file is read in this tab and never leaves it.

Up to 10 MiB and 50 pages. Text output is limited to 1 MiB. Your PDF stays in this tab.

Nothing is sent to a server — there is no upload endpoint behind this.

Where it stops

This reads text. It does not read documents.

A PDF stores characters and where to draw them, and nothing about what they mean. Four things fall through that gap every time.

Equations are drawn glyph by glyph. The text layer has the characters but not the structure, so they arrive out of order.

Cells are just positioned text. Reading them in order gives you the words with none of the rows and columns they belonged to.

Anything drawn rather than typed has no text layer at all, so it does not appear in the output.

A photographed or scanned page is one big image. There is no text to extract, and this tool will tell you so rather than return an empty file.

With OCR

Oyren's OCR reads the page rather than scraping its text layer — the formulas, tables and figures included.