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Markdown Viewer

PDF to Markdown

Convert PDF to Markdown — for RAG, LLMs, and docs

Extract a PDF's text into clean, structured Markdown — ideal for vector databases, retrieval pipelines, and feeding documents to AI. Parsed entirely in your browser, no upload.

Open the editorDOCX to MarkdownURL to Markdown

Drop a .pdf file here, or click to choose

Text is extracted in your browser — the PDF is never uploaded.

No file selected
Markdown output0 chars

How to convert a PDF to Markdown

  1. Drop a .pdf onto the box above (or click to choose). Progress shows per page.
  2. Text is extracted in your browser and structured Markdown appears below.
  3. Copy it or download a .md file.

PDF to Markdown for vector databases & RAG

If you're building a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline, raw PDFs are a poor input — they carry layout artifacts, headers/footers, and no clean structure to chunk on. Converting to Markdown first gives you:

  • Heading-aware chunking — split on #/## boundaries for coherent passages.
  • Token efficiency — Markdown is compact, leaving more room in the context window.
  • Cleaner embeddings — less layout noise means more relevant vector matches.

Pair this with LLM Markdown output validation and rendering AI Markdown safely for the full AI content pipeline.

After conversion

Need a different source? Convert Word to Markdown or pull a web page to Markdown.

Privacy & safety

  • Extraction runs in your browser using pdf.js.
  • We don't upload, store, log, or train on your documents.
  • Only the pdf.js worker script (not your data) is loaded from a CDN.

Frequently asked questions

How does PDF to Markdown work?
Mozilla's pdf.js extracts positioned text runs from each page in your browser, then we reconstruct lines, paragraphs, headings, and bullet lists using font-size and layout heuristics. The result is clean Markdown approximating the document's structure.
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. The PDF bytes are parsed locally with pdf.js. Only the pdf.js worker script is fetched (from a version-pinned CDN) — your document content never leaves the browser.
Does it work on scanned PDFs or images?
No. This tool extracts the embedded text layer. Scanned documents that are just images contain no selectable text, so they produce no output — you'd need OCR first, which is out of scope here.
Why is this useful for RAG and LLMs?
Vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation work best on clean, structured text. Converting PDFs to Markdown gives you headings and lists you can chunk on, strips PDF layout noise, and produces compact, token-efficient context for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Are headings and tables perfectly preserved?
Headings and lists are inferred from font size and layout, so they're a strong approximation, not a guarantee — PDFs store glyph positions, not semantic structure. Complex multi-column layouts and tables may need manual cleanup with the Markdown formatter afterwards.

Related tools

More free browser tools in the same workflow.

Use the API

Ship Markdown features in your product with our REST API — render, convert, audit, and transform documents at scale.

New to the platform? Start with the API quickstart, then try a live request in the API playground.

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