Free PDF to Text and Markdown Converter

Text is read from the PDF along with each fragment's position and font, then grouped into lines by vertical position - the same extraction PDF to Word and PDF to Excel use.

For Markdown, heading levels come from font size relative to the most common size on the page, list items are recognised from a leading bullet or number, and rows that sit in aligned columns with clear gaps become a Markdown table. Plain text skips all of that and gives you the words in reading order.

A PDF with real, selectable text converts directly. A scanned PDF - a photograph of a page - has no text to extract at all, and this tool says so plainly rather than returning nothing with no explanation; the OCR workspace is what reads text out of a scan.

A PDF records where marks sit on a page, not what a paragraph, heading or table is - those are inferred, the same way PDF to Word and PDF to Excel already do it. Markdown can represent even less of a page's structure than a Word document can, so it is worth knowing the limits up front.

Plain text is every word with nothing else - the right choice for pasting into another document, searching, or feeding into a tool that only wants raw content. Markdown keeps headings, lists and tables as real structure, which matters if the result is going into a README, a static site, a wiki, or anywhere Markdown is read as formatting rather than as literal text.

If this tool reports that no text could be found, the PDF is a scan - an image of a page rather than text. Try selecting text in the original with your mouse: if nothing highlights, there is nothing here to extract.

The OCR workspace reads text out of a scan directly in your browser. Run it on the scan first, then bring the result back here if you want it as Markdown.