Free · Private · No sign-up
Convert PDF to Markdown & Plain Text
pdfs2txt turns PDF documents — research papers, reports, ebooks, scanned pages, and forms — into clean, structured Markdown you can edit, search, version-control, or feed straight into an AI model. Drop a file in, pick how you want images handled, and download the result in seconds.
- Keeps headings, lists, tables, and emphasis intact
- Built-in OCR recovers text from scanned and photographed pages
- Files are processed only for the conversion, then deleted
Convert a PDF now
Upload a PDF and download the converted Markdown file.
Why convert PDFs to Markdown?
PDF is a great format for printing a document, but a frustrating one for working with the text inside it. The words you see on screen are often locked into a fixed page layout, split across columns, or — in the case of scanned documents — stored as flat images with no real text at all. Copy and paste from a PDF and you frequently get jumbled line breaks, missing characters, or nothing usable.
Markdown solves this. It is plain text with a tiny bit of structure, so it opens in any editor, lives happily in Git, pastes cleanly into note apps like Obsidian and Notion, and is the preferred input format for large language models. Converting a PDF to Markdown gives you back control of your content: you can search it, diff it, reformat it, and reuse it anywhere. pdfs2txt does that conversion for you while preserving the document's headings, lists, tables, and emphasis.
Features
Structure-aware extraction
Headings, bullet and numbered lists, tables, bold and italic text are carried over as real Markdown — not flattened into one wall of text.
OCR for scanned pages
When a page is an image with no selectable text, built-in Tesseract OCR reads the characters and adds them to the output automatically.
Optional AI image processing
Connect an OpenAI or Google Gemini key to interpret diagrams, complex tables, and handwriting that traditional OCR struggles with.
Page chunking
Split the output by page with horizontal rules, so you can trace any passage back to its original page number.
Private by design
Your upload is processed only for the conversion and then deleted. No accounts, no storage, no tracking of your document contents.
Free and instant
No sign-up, no paywall, no watermarks. Most documents finish converting in a few seconds.
What people use it for
Guides & tutorials
In-depth, practical articles on PDF extraction, OCR, Markdown workflows, and getting documents ready for large language models.
Frequently asked questions
Is pdfs2txt free to use?
Yes. Converting PDFs to Markdown with the built-in text extraction and Tesseract OCR is completely free, with no account, no file limits beyond a sensible size cap, and no watermarks. The only optional paid part is AI image processing, which uses your own OpenAI or Gemini API key and is billed by those providers, not by us.
What happens to my uploaded files?
Your PDF is uploaded over an encrypted HTTPS connection, processed on the server only for the duration of the conversion, and then deleted. The converted Markdown is held briefly for a single download and removed after you fetch it. We do not store, share, or analyse the contents of your documents. See our privacy policy for details.
Can it handle scanned PDFs?
Yes. If a page has little or no selectable text, pdfs2txt detects this and runs OCR to recover the words from the page image. Choose the OCR option before converting. For scans with diagrams or handwriting, the optional AI image processing produces better results. Our guide on converting scanned PDFs to text walks through the details.
Will my tables and formatting be preserved?
In most cases, yes. The converter maps PDF headings, lists, emphasis, and tables onto their Markdown equivalents. Very complex or visually-styled tables can lose some structure — for those, see our guide on converting PDF tables to Markdown.
Why convert to Markdown instead of Word or plain .txt?
Markdown keeps document structure (headings, lists,
tables) in a lightweight, human-readable form that works everywhere —
editors, Git, static-site generators, note apps, and AI tools — without the
bloat of a proprietary format. Plain .txt loses all structure;
Word files are heavier and harder to diff or automate. You can always
convert Markdown onward to other formats later.
Do I need an API key?
No. Standard text extraction and OCR run entirely on our server and need no key. An API key is only required if you opt into AI image processing with OpenAI or Google Gemini, in which case you supply your own key and it is used only for that single request.
What size and type of PDFs are supported?
Standard PDF files up to roughly 50 MB are supported, whether they are digitally created or scanned. Password-protected PDFs need to be unlocked before uploading.