Markdown is plain text with a little structure: a line that starts with # is a heading, a line that starts with a dash is a list item, and everything else is a paragraph. It is the format of note apps like Obsidian and Notion, of README files on GitHub, of many wikis and blogs, and it is the format AI assistants read best. PDF to Markdown turns a PDF into that kind of clean, structured text, so you can keep, search, edit and reuse what is inside the document.
The tool reads each page and works out its structure. Text that is clearly bigger than the body text becomes a heading, with one, two or three # signs depending on its size, so a chapter title and a section title stay different. Lines that start with bullets, dashes or numbers become a proper list. Lines that were wrapped by the page width are joined back into whole paragraphs, and words split with a hyphen at the end of a line are put back together.
Running headers, footers and page numbers are left out by default, because in a note they are just noise. The tool spots text that repeats at the top or bottom of most pages, such as a report title or “Page 3 of 20”, and drops it. Turn off Leave out headers and page numbers if you want to keep them. You can convert the whole PDF or only some pages; tap them or type a range like 5-12.
When it is done, download the .md file or press Copy text and paste it straight into your notes or a chat. Characters that mean something in Markdown, such as asterisks, are escaped so they show as written. Everything runs in your browser on this device, the file is never uploaded, and there is nothing to install.
Some things don’t survive the trip: images are left out, and tables and two-column pages come out as lines of text in reading order, so check those parts. A scanned PDF has no text to read; run OCR PDF on it first. For plain text without any structure, PDF to Text is simpler.